27 Jul Appeal to Accomplishment – FT#79
Show Notes
The Appeal to Accomplishment Fallacy is committed when someone refers to their abilities or achievements as a reason to believe them rather than using arguments.
Trump
We started out with Trump talking about what a rich, successful friend of his said:
Then we talked about this extremely self-aware Trump tweet:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about the Boris’s claims about the success of Test and Trace and Starmer’s response during this exchange in Prime Minister’s Questions:
And then we looked at his claims that the only reason we’ve had such a successful vaccine rollout is Brexit:
Fallacy in the Wild
We talked about this clip from Beauty and the Beast:
We followed that up by talking about this clip from The Bourne Legacy:
And we finished by talking about this clip from Smallville:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- We don’t want any more windows. It’s going to be real hard to sell apartments, I think. We have a beautiful apartment, and for environmental reasons, we have not put windows in the building. Oh great. Well, that sounds good. These people are crazy. Whatever happened to cows, remember they were going to get rid of all the cows? They stopped that, people didn’t like that. Remember? You know why they were going to get rid of all the cows? People will be next. People will be next.
- The county has, for whatever reason, also refused to produce the network routers. We want the routers, Sonny, Wendy, we got to get those routers, please. The routers. Come on, Kelly, we can get those routers. Those routers. You know what? We’re so beyond the routers, there’s so many fraudulent votes without the routers. But if you got those routers, what that will show, and they don’t want to give up the routers. They don’t want to give them. They are fighting like hell. Why are these commissioners fighting not to give the routers?
- And Governor Ducey is going to have a tough time. Nobody’s going to want to work for him, and to be honest I’m not a fan. What do you think? That’s what I thought. I liked him. I thought he was a good guy, and he wanted my endorsement. I don’t think so. Not when you don’t support a totally legal and necessary recount. Because that’s what it is. And you know, the people I endorse, they win. That’s what happens. Ducey won’t be winning again, I can tell you that. He won’t be winning a dog show.
Click below for the answer
Mark got it right again this week, and is currently on 48%
Sanctions are not a logical fallacy
We talked about the amazing sanctions hearing against the Kraken lawyers including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- In the continuing adventures of the rightwing British News channel, GBNews, Welsh presenter Guto Harri was suspended for not being racist enough. After three black British footballers missed penalties in a game, and were subjected to torrents of racist abuse online, Harri said that it turned out people were a bit more racist than he thought, and that’s not great. He might of gotten away with that… maybe, but then he decided to take a knee live on air, making very clear it was just a gesture against racism and in no way supporting Black Lives Matter, lest anyone think he was actually, you know, all the way good. GB News’s last remaining viewers were both very upset at Harri’s display of wokeness, and the bastions of free speech that run the channel released a self contradictory statement saying they have no company line on taking the knee, but that when Harri did it on air it was ‘an unacceptable breach of standards’. Harri resigned following his suspension, and all the gammon faced viewers can relax, safe in the knowledge they won’t see anyone else condemning racist abuse. If a channel implodes and nobody’s watching, does it make a sound? That might be a harder question in the case of GB News, because all the technical issues they had back in the glory days of six weeks ago meant they frequently didn’t make a sound even when they had viewers.
- Another one of those out-of-mainstream-work-now-the-Tories-have-engulfed-their-followers `far-right British commentators” Katie Hopkins, who at some point doubtless said she’d leave these shores if the immigrant crisis doesn’t let up, left these shores to go and participate in Big Brother Australia of all things – well she’d been a “star” on the Apprentice whilst during her probationary period with the Met Office – of all things! (Spoiler alert she finished neither job!) Anyway happily thinking she’s the champion of the populist zeitgeist she declared lockdowns as the “greatest hoax in human history”, and not yet even out of quarantining in a hotel prior to going on the actual show posted a video online of her saying she was looking forward to opening the door maskless and apparently clotheless *shudder* to the people bringing her her food. Australia with just 918 deaths in a country – well the size of Australia – takes quarantining very seriously and viewed this as a wilful endangering of key workers lives, which of course it is! So the government fined her,rescinded her work visa, voted her out of the Big Brother house, and the entire country. Further evidence that the right don’t do humour she later posted “It was a joo–ooke!” and who’s laughing now? – the whole fucking planet you failed conspiracy-peddling nonentity. I’ll leave you with an insightful statement on her reason for successfully joining utterly-pointless-now-the-Tory-party-have-engulfed- etc etc political party UKIP in Jan 2021 – after 6 years of being rejected! – “People always ask me … when am I going to do something smarter than just gob off on social media?” Yep still waiting!
- Trump supporters have learned a lot from the Trump family – that you can just call any fact you don’t like fake, that you can still yell snowflake at people even as you melt away into a small puddle of your own inadequacy, and in the case of January 6th insurrectionist Douglas Austin Jensen, that you can get away with crimes if you’re just too fucking stupid to know what crime you’re actually committing. Jensen, wearing a QAnon t-shirt, is prominently featured in much of the footage inside the Capitol on January 6th, including a sequence where he led the mob chasing Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs towards the Senate Chamber. However, videos from Jensen’s phone show him before breaching the building, with his hand on the outer wall of the US Capitol, saying “This is me, touching the fucking White House” and “I am at the White House, just so you know”. Based in part on the revelation that Jensen is stupid even for a QAnon believing Trump supporter, Judge Timothy Kelly released him from jail and ordered house arrest pending his trial because he didn’t believe Jensen planned the attack “when he had no basic understanding of where he even was that day.”
- Back in the 60s in the heyday of free love hippie era a avante-garde electronics artist/utter charlatan and chancer called Magic Alex surfed the zeitgeist by convincing John Lennon he could make 72-track tape recorders and speakers that used light to transmit sound and allsorts of similar tech-bollocks that the not-very-business-minded and very drugged-up-to-the-eyeballs Beatles simply loved. He cleverly kept delaying the releases of anything and kept all the advance money. If we are doomed to repeat history until we learn, then enter the Freedom Phone, a conservative phone made for conservatives by a conservative company – also conservatively called Freedom Phone. The ads trumpet a $500 high-end phone that promises a support infrastructure that won’t ban anything ever, so will give voice to those Parler and Gab apps that the cancel culture of Apple and Android have so blatantly taken from you. However in an echo of the capitalist online raffle that is Wish.com; all is not what it seems. The phone appears to be a $120 clone manufactured Patriotically by Chinese company Umidigi, running FreedomOS – Which is basically LineageOS an open source Android code. The “we don’t ban apps, period!” store, called excruciatingly: “Patriapp” is just a front end using the Google Play store API – which means it’s the Google Play Store – you know the hated provider that banned Gab and Parler! I’m still interested though – how do I pay for this thing? – well if you blinked you’d have missed the day or two when Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, PayPal, Discover, Amazon Pay all disappeared leaving only Shopify and WooCommerce last Monday. Arstechnica.com reported that they guessed some multiple discount codes that Woocommerce happily accepted, you know the usual Trump2024, MAGA etc and managed to discount it to…. yep, $0 plus $20 shipping – not bad for a new $120 Android compatible phone! if it ever arrives of course. Still at least them Trump voters will have somewhere to voice their united chant of “we ain’t gonna get fooled again” hey!
- OK, this is going to shock you, but one of Trump’s closest advisors has been arrested for illegally lobbying as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, as well as obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI. Hold on a minute, I’m just going to save that last bit of audio in a file so I can use it when this inevitably happens again. After all, I could have used it word for word at least five times so far. What the fuck? Was anyone in the Trump administration actually lobbying for America? Anyway, this time it’s Tom Barrack, chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee which, incidentally, is currently being sued for funnelling over a million dollars into Trump’s private businesses. Barrack used his position as Trump adviser to advocate on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, including sending a draft of a Trump speech on energy to UAE officials and inserting pro-UAE phrases in the speech, and repeatedly influencing foreign policy decisions in favor of the UAE. Billionaire Barrack has been released on $250 million bail, which is the third largest bail amount in US history. I’ve said it before, but if Trump really wanted Hillary locked up, he should have just given her a job in his administration.
- Remember back in the heady days after Trump lost the election and was still in office and he invited his followers, the believers, future insurrectionists if you will to donate to the cause to overturn this fraudulent result? You do? Good cos Politico published a damning report exposing that contributors’ money wasn’t going toward pointless recounts, silly audits, and hapless lawsuits. Rather, most of the funds went to the Save America PAC – derided by campaign-finance experts as “essentially a type of slush fund, with few restrictions on how the money they raise can be spent.” “Sheeyit yeah we remember that – haw-haw what a crook we love him sticking it to the man – yeah we ain’t falling for that again no siree-bob!” But d’uh of course they are, and of course he is doing it again; Save America isn’t just raising money through his political action committee, on the face of it it’s also a vessel through which the Republican is rescuing the United States claiming that Trump is actually working to protect their vote in ads that declare; “We need you to join the fight to SECURE OUR ELECTIONS! Of course none of it is doing any of that. The $75 million dollars raised in 2021 thus far is not going into more pointless audits and other election-securing ‘Murica-Saviing court cases, course not it’s going towards Trump’s travel legal and sundry other expenses or sitting in the bank gathering interest to save for future travel and legal costs and sundry other expenses.” He’s shamelessly lived off all you tax-paying patriots for years, even when in the White House and now he’s that out of power. Of course the moment Trump stops lying about his defeat is the moment this lucrative cash cow disappears. Many have long assumed his election lies are about his ego, which is only slightly smaller than his wallet. He is the world’s most expensive after-dinner speaker, he no longer has to pretend to run the country as a driver for talking nonsense, he can just dribble any old shite out of his mouth and you-all will pay to lap it up!
- Well, CPAC happened again. And if you’re thinking “It can’t be a year already”, don’t worry. For reasons I still can’t quite figure out, they did a bit of CPAC 2021 in Florida in February, and then finished it off this month in Dallas. The theme was still America Uncancelled, and yet again they cancelled someone before it even started, banning white supremacist Nick Fuentes from attending. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were still there, of course, among the tightly packed, unvaccinated, QAnon shirt wearing crowd. Kimberly Guilfoyle showed once again that her volume switch starts at 11 and goes up from there, and Don Jr tried some jokes at Texas’s expense, which could not have gone worse. Madison Cawthorn claimed that Biden’s door to door vaccination plan would lead to your bibles and guns being confiscated, Lauren Boebert railed against the welfare she has previously said she benefited from, and a 9/11 truther handed out cards printed with a 7 point plan to get Trump reinstated as President within a couple of days. Notably, all 7 points are batshit and rely entirely on the Republicans having control of the House. Which they don’t. They held a straw poll to find out who attendees wanted to run for President in 2024, and before the results were revealed, Trump told the crowd exactly how he fools them, saying “If it’s bad, I just say it’s fake. If it’s good, I say, ‘That’s the most accurate poll, perhaps, ever’” The slow-witted cultists laughed, and overwhelmingly voted for him as their leader.
- On July 16th the UK had Freedom Day, an irreversible decision by incoming Health Secretary Sajid Javid, despite being at the height of our fourth wave (third if you play the govt’s game of combining December’s and January’s separate waves). The language, of course, maintains Johnson’s continuing story that he is the saviour, the bringer of freedom – “look what he’s accomplished that Labour hasn’t” and thus continues to foment polarisation if not an entirely new health-based branch of his culture war. Inevitably Sajid Javid ‘ad Covid. And as a result of the pingdemic – a gaslight-y renaming of the pandemic, Johnson was told by the test and trace app that he really did have to self-isolate after u-turning three hours of pretending that he didn’t cos he Sunak and Gove – all in the room with Javid – were, surprise surprise, selected for a secret random pilot programme meaning tests not isolation, which, no-surprise at all, didn’t fucking exist! Irreversible derestrictions were reversed, masks remained on public transport, unpopular covid passports will be introduced for large events, as was quarantine for travellers returning from France. The current wave – which lets face it includes the numbers from the 80,000 crowd at the Euros superspreader soccer finals, seems to be waning – but the numbers aren’t yet in from the effects of Freedom Day itself. Never mind Bitcoin, I’m buying shares in Lockdown 4. Hey ho, only 3 more years til the general election and possible actual freedom from the real problem – the government – but what is the solution in the week when Boris is so unpopular his rating is almost as low as Starmer’s!!
That’s all for this week, and thanks for listening!
