28 Jun Ignoring Linear Time – FT#77
Show Notes
The fallacy of Ignoring Linear Time is committed when someone acts like because something hasn’t happened yet then it can’t or won’t happen.
Trump
We started out by talking about these clips of Trump debating Biden:
And then we looked at Trump claiming Hillary couldn’t beat ISIS because she hadn’t already done it:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Chris Philp, the Minister for Immigration, Compliance and Justice, defending the government’s new attempts at fixing the ‘broken’ immigration against questions about why they haven’t already fixed it:
Fallacy in the Wild
We talked about this clip from Yesterday:
We followed that up by talking about this clip from Castle:
Then we looked at this clip from The Rookie:
We also talked about this clip from The King of Staten Island:
And we finished by talking about this lyric from Eminem’s Same Song and Dance:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- What we have to do is… We know what we have to do, and that is stand up for our country, because if we don’t stand up we’re going to lose our country. And the people that are in charge right now, they’re unbelievable. All the things they want are very very bad. Bad things are happening on a level that nobody’s ever seen. You see what goes on – it’s all de-funding. De-funding. Can you believe this? It’s a disgrace what’s happening. We can’t allow it to happen. We’re going to take our country back, and soon. Probably a lot sooner than you think.
- We did things that nobody has ever done. I’m very proud of the biggest bet. This was maybe the greatest bet ever made in the history of the world because we saved a year. We bought billions of dollars of this vaccine before we even knew it worked. And because of that, we’ve all, most of you, I guess, all of you, just about, in one form or another, you’ve had your shots or jabs as they like to call it. I actually like the other word better, but we’ve saved a lot of lives. We’ve saved all over the world. We’ve saved millions and millions of lives and I’m very proud of it.
- It was the most terrible thing to watch. And the general in charge would say, “Sir, you’re going to see things that you maybe will not have seen.” “Like what, General?” He said, “Mothers and wives, and even fathers sometimes, breaking through the military ranks and jumping on top of the coffin.” And I got to see that one time where a mother, was just absolutely, she was devastated. She jumped on and these incredible, extremely fit soldiers are taking that coffin, and would jump onto the coffin, and they wouldn’t do a thing, they would just keep walking.
Click below for the answer
Mark got it right this week, and is currently on 47%
GB News is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the amazingly awful, amateurish new right-wing news channel in the UK, GB News. I highly recommend this Twitter account which collected some of the worst moments of their first week.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- A local Fox News reporter in Houston decided to end her career in style last week when she opened her report on the Texas heatwave with this: “Before we get to that story, I want to let you, the viewers, know that Fox Corp. has been muzzling me to keep certain information from you, the viewers, and from what I’m gathering, I am not the only reporter being subjected to this. I am going to be releasing some recordings about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox, because it applies to you, the viewers. I found a non-profit journalism group called Project Veritas that is going to help put that out tomorrow, so tune in then.” Seems like if she was any good as a reporter she might have looked into Project Veritas’s reputation, but then if she was any good as a reporter she probably wouldn’t have been working for Fox in the first place. Conservatives who feel like Fox is a bit too left wing got all excited about what the revelations would be. Fox, meanwhile, immediately fired Hecker, and then told the Daily Beast “This incident involves nothing more than a disgruntled former employee seeking publicity by promoting a false narrative produced through selective editing and misrepresentation.”, which is a fantastic bit of Ignoring Linear Time – like, sure, NOW she’s a disgruntled former employee! Anyway, it turns out that Hecker was being muzzled because she wasn’t allowed to do stories about Bitcoin during the 5pm broadcast, because nobody who’s watching then cares about Bitcoin, and she was told she ‘failed as a reporter’ for still pushing hydroxychloroquine stories long after it had been debunked. So… yay Fox?
- ‘He who it is not legal to believe’ – Tucker Carlson is as usual breaking the laws of causality on Fox News in his explanation of who was behind the Capitol Hill insurrection on Jan 6th. After all those involved, he calls them “unindicted co-conspirators”, have not been prosecuted yet; yeah but that’s cos lawyers are building cases; in the world’s most litigious country that’s probably wise, nor says Carlson have any of the suspects been named; yeah see above. “Why is that?” he asks, he didn’t hear me explain either of those just then, and he doesn’t even wait for an answer, but in true RacyRist® fashion (If Anti fascists can be diminished into Antifa then Cosplaying Conspiracy Theorists can be too) in true RacyRist® fashion he allows his audience to simply use their biases; “You know why; it’s because they are almost certainly working for the FBI” Ah yeah dur silly me, that could be the only possibility that logically and inexorably follows; “the government knows who they are and yet won’t arrest them cos they work for them”. Those of us familiar with the need for a lodestar to follow amongst the leader-craving directionless Q, Q+ and Qcurious RacyRist Qummunities (see our sister podcast for patreons) recognise the ache for absolute certainty that comes with stupid! Carlson is the anonymous twat, sorry tweeter, being a bully behind a humourless ID, he’s the little skinny kid waving his fist from behind the bigger kid and saying ‘yeah thump him go on!’ As Tucker Himself says; “This is crazy and we should resist it” Yeah too right quick before the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene add extra wheels to the populist bandwagon in an attempt to get the RacyRist Qummunity to unthinkingly give her lots of money…uh-oh I think we may be too late…
- A long time ago, Mark and I ran a film festival together and well, we totally overestimated the local interest in independent film, and hardly anyone showed up. In a totally unrelated story, Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman who looks like someone ordered Ron Swanson on Wish.com, held a rally the other weekend in Wisconsin, and, well, hardly anyone showed up. Most embarrassingly, the jets that Mike expected to fly over at the end of the National Anthem didn’t show up either, leaving Mike awkwardly standing on stage looking into the distance, and saying ‘is that them’? It wasn’t. In other rally news, Trump announced a tour with Bill O’Reilly through the end of the year, and Trump’s most ardent supporters, the Q Anon crowd, are furious. Yeah, I thought they’d be happy too, but it turns out that this messes with their theory that he’s going to be back in the White House by August. Honestly, I don’t know why this is the mental hurdle they can’t pole vault over, when usually they believe six much more impossible things before breakfast. Meanwhile, another barrier to Trump’s return to power might be the announcement that the Manhattan DA’s office is now investigating Trump’s COO and former bodyguard Matthew Calamari which, to be honest, I only bring up for one glorious reason…
- We all have that uncle who at Christmas when we were a kid could make a spoon stick to his nose. When we asked could someone explain it they played along, said it was magic, or magnetism, cos we were like 4. Now imagine getting someone to do that before a committee in an Ohio Statehouse as part of a Republican campaign to advance House Bill 248, which would prevent schools and businesses from asking people if they are vaccinated for instance. So your uncle, who’s now well into his 90’s, is demonstrating his party trick to them, and you, now an adult in your 40s and a qualified medical professional at that, are asking the gathered judiciary to explain it for you. Somewhere between acute embarrassment, the Tooth Fairy and Santa (agh spoiler alert), someone would cough and mumble and talk about capillary action, the combined curvature of noses and spoons and your uncle would nod and the spoon would fall off and the cat would be out the bag. Ridiculous! would never happen in real life! – yep yep it did, last Tuesday an anti-vaxxer nurse, in an appeal to her own authority, tried to defend Dr. Sherri Tenpenny’s testimony about magnetic vaccine crystals (spoiler alert no such thing) which channels 5G signals (nope) by sticking a key magnetically to her chest (ah… she didn’t!) – something about the interplay of almost horizontal surfaces and moisture, and then also failing to do the same to her much more vertical neck with the key and even a much lighter hairpin. Turns out she’d learned this over lunch – possibly from the joke book that came with the Happy Meal her uncle bought her? Neither the hearing committee nor Dr. Sherri Tenpenny has thanked her for her testimony. However gravity, the public behind her, and a mass TV audience laughed in her 4 year old reddening face!
- Texas GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert was obviously listening to our last episode and heard that Mo Brooks was making a run at the coveted title of dumbest congressperson. Well Louie said “hold my motherfucking beer” and secured the championship for 2021. On a Zoom call with Jennifer Eberlein, the Associate Deputy Chief of the US Forest Service, Gohmert started brainstorming ways to combat climate change, and recalled that NASA said the moon’s orbit was gradually changing, as is the earth’s orbit around the sun, and he asked the grown-up he was talking to “is there anything that the National Forest Service or [the Bureau of Land Management] can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit, or the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Obviously that would have profound effects on our climate.” Now there are those who say he was being sarcastic, which he wasn’t, and still more who say he was just being a science-denying asshole claiming climate change is not anthropogenic. Of course, when one of the options is a Republican politician being a science-denying asshole, that’s usually the right one, but I feel those people are just failing to grasp how profoundly stupid Louie is.
- Remember when we were all exhorted to Make America Great Again? In the possibly rather retro FBI acid-tested Cold War mind of good ol’ boy Tom Cotton – Yes Republican. Yes Arizona, this was somewhere between Sputnik and Neil Armstrong. Steeped in black n white Dr Strangelove coldwar sci-fi RacyRist-isms® he’s written a letter, yes he writes and yes that old-school to Joe Biden warning about the true intent of the hosts of the 2022 Winter Olympics. In the letter, Cotton warns Biden that Beijing plans on using the 2022 Winter Olympics as a giant funnel for precious American DNA, harvesting the nation’s fittest and finest for their genomic information as part of a plan to achieve military dominance. Apart from the seemingly genetic co-presence of predilections for racism, obesity, distrust of communist principles in the very DNA of all-American heroes he could be onto something. No. No he isn’t – he is Slim Pickens riding the nuke to its target wahoo-ing his cowboy hat ignorant of any and all ramifications of his misogynist, xenophobic war-mongering Racyrist attitudes. YeeHaw!
- It was the G7 last week, and Joe Biden visited the UK and met with the Queen and various world leaders, all of whom looked significantly more relaxed now that they don’t have to make awkward smalltalk with Bloaty McBloatface. On the whole Biden seemed to do pretty well, but of course Hannity and the rest of the Fox News team characterised the entire visit as a disastrous embarrassment, but heaviest condemnation came for his meeting with Putin. Basically, it seems that some time in May the entire Republican party and right wing media went to that company from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and had all memory of Trump’s disastrously embarrassing 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki erased from their minds. At least that’s the only explanation for the official RNC statement that “giving Putin a meeting is just the latest win that Joe Biden has handed Russia” or for Hannity saying “Vladimir received a massive platform in exchange for zero concessions whatsoever.” What they didn’t mention is that Biden didn’t side with Putin over every US intelligence agency, defend the fact that Putin’s a killer on the grounds that America’s got a lot of killers, or call him ‘very smart’.
- In British politics this time, hopeless bloke Dominic Cummings says hopeless bloke Boris Johnson called hopeless bloke Matt Hancock a hopeless bloke, a fucking hopeless bloke to be precise on Whatsapp. Nothing we didn’t know, and which of course has made no difference. Driven by data not dates Boris Johnson reneged on his promise to lift all Covid restrictions by 21st June postponing it to July 19th cos of the delta virus he failed to stop coming into the country by May 15th. The intervening space will of course be completely spaffed up the wall by useless blokes and we’ll be no further forward backwards sideways in any direction by then. It’s beginning to dawn on them that putting all the vaccine eggs in one fix-covid basket might not be the best policy if the fall guy Matt Hancock actually falls over and reveals that there was no actual point to putting the prick in the arm of 50 million people if you still can’t stop the virus numbers rising, or that such a large and inoculated populus will begin demanding that they might at least go and stand in a field in the open air with other disease-free people and listen to music from the Vaccines for instance. Praps we should just use the combined magnetic might of all 50 million of us to pull the screws out of the padlocks to the door of Number 10 Downing Street, swarm inside and reveal the emperor in all his new-clothedness – eeww no brrr!
That’s all for this week, and thanks for listening!
