Conflating Views – FT#88

29 Nov Conflating Views – FT#88

Show Notes

The Conflating Views Fallacy is committed when someone conflates the opinions or actions of multiple people within a group and suggests if those views conflict that the group is hypocritical.

Trump

We started out with this clip of Trump claiming people who wanted the wall then complained about getting the wall:

We followed that with this clip of Trump claiming Biden had vowed to defund the police:

And finally we talked about this tweet from Candace Owens:

The kind of people who thought O.J Simpson was innocent are the same people who believe that Kyle Rittenhouse is guilty.

Facts don’t matter to emotionally-indoctrinated zombies.

Only feelings do.

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) November 13, 2021

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Home Secretary Priti Patel conflating the immigration system that rejected the perpetrator of a recent bombing in Liverpool with the “broken system” (that she presides over) that lets these sort of people in.

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Gone With The Wind:

Then we discussed this clip from Breast Men.

And finally, we talked about this clip from The West Wing.

Fake News

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

1. They left with all their equipment behind. They left brand new airplanes and brand new everything. They have more equipment – you know they have 700,000 machine guns and rifles and guns and many of them are on the on the black market, they don’t need that many. Many are on the black market. We had 28 Apache helicopters – the most incredible machine and you know who’s got them now? Two of them each. Russia has two, China has two. Because they’re back engineering it so that they can build the exact same helicopter
2. If you look at the border, it’s the worst – when I was, when I took over it was terrible and I fixed it, we had no drugs coming through, like the least drugs ever, by which I mean forty years, and now it’s the total opposite. Just this week they stopped a record, like a truck with an amount of fentanyl and crystal meth like nobody’s ever seen – bad stuff. And that’s just the stuff they’re catching. What about the rest? I had a great relationship with the President of Mexico, he liked me a lot, we got on very well.
3. They are corrupt, they are and I say it and I don’t want to say it much, but I say it and I hope in the future I won’t have to, they are the enemy of the people and we could have a country that would be able to heal and get together except the media foments it. They’re so corrupt and you know I called it – I came up with the term fake news a long time ago, I don’t know if I’ll get credit for that but that’s OK. The fake news, but it’s really the corrupt news. It’s corrupt, what they do and they’re so important, it could be, well… important.

Click below for the answer

Mark got it right this week, and is on 51%

Vaccine detoxing not a logical fallacy

We talked about all the fun ways anti-vaxxers try to get rid of the vaccine after they’ve been vaccinated.

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

• As we mentioned earlier, Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty. Which is pretty shit. The Opening Arguments podcast and the Legal Eagle YouTube channel both have excellent episodes covering just what happened, but instead I wanted to talk about the bizarre right wing hero worship of a teenager who, in the kindest possible interpretation of events, killed two unarmed men because he was scared of them. This makes him such an alpha male in the eyes of a party where Trump is seen as manly, that the worst Congresspeople you can name are literally challenging each other to contests of strength to decide who gets to employ him as an intern.  Matt Gaetz was quick off the mark to offer him the job, which is weird, because he’s 18 now, which I thought was a bit old for Matt, and then Paul Gosar offered to arm wrestle Gaetz to settle the matter, presumably thinking that his dentistry endowed body language skills would give him some kind of advantage. Madison Cawthorn displayed his impressive originality by issuing the exact same challenge to Lauren Boebert, who then went on Newsmax to instead challenge the wheelchair bound Cawthorn to a sprint to win the honor of employing a kid with fatally poor judgement.  I say let’s up the stakes. Get together every single Congressperson who is even slightly interested in having Rittenhouse as their intern, and fight to the death. Last one standing wins, and America gets a government with slightly fewer craven pieces of shit. Speaking of craven pieces of shit, Marjorie Taylor Greene has now introduced a bill to award Rittenhouse a Congressional Gold Medal – the highest honor Congress can bestow on a civilian. This, by the way is the very same Marjorie Taylor Greene who voted against awarding Congressional Gold Medals to the law enforcement officers who protected the US Capitol on January 6th.
• Looking like a fat mid-alien-transformation Wikus van de Merwe from District 9, MyPillow chief and rabid pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell now blames his lack of filing his awesome election-fraud complaint to the Supreme Court on yet more interference from outside. This time it’s not the obvious opponents (cough) Newsmax or Foxnews or even invisible ones like “antifa” but this time the actual Republican Party itself. Apparently cos head of the RNC Ronna McDaniel last week finally made a statement that Biden won the election 10 months after he took office and three days before Lindell was due to submit the complaint. Nothing to do with Lindell not having written anything of course or that he couldn’t muster any state attorney generals to sign it despite flying from coast to coast pretty much since Trump lost the election. But not one to back down from a delusional pursuit; remember his withdrawn $5million reward to anyone who could disprove his non-existent 37 terabytes of irrefutable evidence that the Chinese flipped all the states in the election? He said he is going to publish the contents of his Supreme Court filing by Thanksgiving anyway – yeah cos that’ll make all the State Attorney Generals change their minds for sure! The Daily Beast had the journalistic integrity to ask him a couple of days later about his non-existent Supreme Court filing and why it hasn’t been made public, only to be told by Lindell in a very Trumpian way “Are you out of your mind? You call me again, I am suing you!” a real foam-filled chip off the ol’ blockhead ain’cha Mike?!
• The January 6th Committee has been busy issuing subpoenas again, with the latest round including Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and members of the Oath Keepers right wing militia organisation.  Given Steve Bannon’s recent indictment, it seems likely that they’ll keep the appointment, but both have already said they will probably plead the fifth in response to any questions. The committee is probably also going to want to speak to Amy and Kylie Kremer, who run Women for America First, a group that helped plan the protest that boiled over into an insurrection. Rolling Stone reported last week that Kylie Kremer had an aide buy three burner phones and said it was “of the utmost importance” that they pay with cash. They then exclusively used these phones to talk with Mark Meadows, Eric Trump and other members of the administration, which is exactly the kind of behavior that any normal, law abiding person does when they are arranging a legal gathering. Definitely nothing to see here and no reason to investigate further. 
• Last Thursday evening and thru Friday morning, in what was effectively a twitter fact-checking service Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi included the tweet “House Democrats are preparing to pass landmark legislation to lower costs, fight inflation and make big corporations and the wealthiest pay their fair share, but Kevin McCarthy is welcome to keep getting facts wrong on the House Floor.” Plus she had to hand over her pinball crown to him for speaking for the longest, she previously held the record for speaking for eight hours and seven minutes on an immigration reform bill. Kevin spoke from  8.38pm to 5.10am – 8 hours 32 mins in an impassioned way about the merits of not building back better, not making health care and prescriptions cheaper? Nah not even that – he moaned about not being able to afford a Tesla, wishing he’d seen Tiananmen square and the Berlin wall come down, how he had had his booster jab and now a headache, Abraham Lincoln, and the best portraits in his office. Adam Schiff neatly summed it up “If you took the worst orator in the world, gave him the worst speech in the world, and made him read it for the longest time in the world, that would be a lot like listening to Kevin McCarthy tonight… Except, probably better.” When asked what was the point of it all Rep Dan Newhouse, told The Independent “I have no idea”. The bill passed 220 to 213 shortly before 10am on the Friday.
• Yet another person subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee is former Bernie Kerik. Trump had something to say about that one, and he issued the following statement: – Now there’s a LOT to unpack there. Not least the question of what the fuck Trump thinks attorney client privilege is, since neither he nor Kerik is an attorney. Since we’re asking questions, I’d add why they have kept this massive trove of voter fraud evidence hidden – were they just hoping someone would subpoena it so they could point and laugh and shout “Ha! Checkmate libtards!”? Finally, there’s Trump’s definition of an American Patriot. This is a man who, when he was New York Police Commissioner post 9/11, used taxpayer funds to set up an apartment for 9/11 first responders but actually used the apartment to carry on two separate affairs, then went to work for the Bush Administration where he took a quarter million dollar bribe from an Israeli billionaire before ultimately being convicted of eight counts of tax fraud and sentenced to 4 years in prison, from which Trump rescued him with a pardon in 2020. Awesome patriot.

• Remember the voter fraud fraud that Trump convinced everyone with, well the republicans, because they lost basically, and let’s face it even when he won first time round? Anyway the republicans were so convinced that they investigated it all over aaaaand turns out it was them whodunnit. Rosemarie Hartle’s vote in the last presidential election, three years after her death, was trumpeted in November 2020 by the Nevada Republican Party as proof of the fraud, the mystery has been solved, on Tuesday, her widower Donald Kirk Hartle pleaded guilty to the crime of voting more than once in the same election. The judge, 8 News Now reported, said Hartle had pulled what seemed like a “cheap political stunt that kind of backfired and shows that our voting system actually works because you were ultimately caught.”. And it has caught Republican miscreants before too – In November 2020, the Trump campaign highlighted a case in which a ballot was cast in the name of a long-dead Pennsylvania woman. Her son later pleaded guilty to casting that ballot for Trump, saying, he had “listened to too much propaganda and made a stupid mistake.” In Ohio a Republican official admitted to forging a signature to cast a ballot under the name of his recently deceased father; he told NBC News it was an “honest error” and also that he had simply been “trying to execute a dying man’s wishes.” In Colorado, a man who was charged in 2021 with murdering his wife, who had disappeared in May 2020, was also charged with illegally casting her ballot, for Trump, in the November election. He allegedly told FBI agents that he submitted the ballot because he thought “all these other guys are cheating” and his wife would have voted for Trump anyway. When approached by CNN the Nevada Republican party refused to comment on all this – doing the usual thing of throwing sensational claims into the public realm before the actual facts are known then if inconvenient actual facts eventually emerge, just quietly move on to the next sensational claim, confident that the truth will never reach a good chunk of the Republican base – dead or alive!
• It’s always fun to hear about insurrectionists who have left the ‘fuck around’ part of the equation far behind and are now squarely in the ‘find out’ part. Like Q Anon Shaman Jacob Chansley for example, who has now been sentenced to 41 months in prison, although he’s now hired Rittenhouse’s lawyer for a possible appeal. Given that his claims he was entirely peaceful were somewhat undermined by video played at the trial of him in the Senate chamber shouting ‘Time’s up motherfuckers!’ I don’t think ineffective counsel was his problem.  Insurrectionist John Lolos won’t really be able to claim that either, since he completely ignored his lawyer’s advice to shut the fuck up and went on a 20 minute rant immediately prior to sentencing, in which he claimed the “smallest police officer I’ve ever seen in my whole life” encouraged him to trespass in the Capitol building, and that he only went through the broken window to talk to the police. The judge didn’t buy his claims of leprechaun cops, and said “You thought the way to get to a designated protest area was through a broken window?” Meanwhile, Trump’s July claim that there were no guns whatsoever at the protest have been debunked, er, again, with the charging of insurrectionist Mark Mazza, who like, so many other’s helpfully tweeted a video of him insurrectioning. He carried with him a Taurus Judge, a revolver which can fire both regular .45 ammo, and shotgun shells, both of which Mazza was carrying that day. When the FBI picked him up he said he had been hoping to find Nancy Pelosi, but now he was glad he hadn’t, because “you’d be here for another reason.” But sure. Peaceful protest, just tourists taking a look at the Capitol, no harm done, and it was mostly antifa and BLM anyway…   
• This week on Sick-Man-of-Europe Island governed by what former Tory minister Ken Clark described as an elected dictatorship Priti Patel continues to mither about taking back control of our borders by complaining that the French aren’t doing enough to control our borders and blaming the 27 migrants who drowned attempting to cross the channel for wanting to live in the UK. The Tories are finally seen to be the caring sharing party that they aren’t by reneging on the vow that you won’t have to sell your house to afford care in your old age, but only if you are poor so that’s not really reneging on those people who count/donate to the party. They also reneged on building large chunks of the HS2 HiSpeed rail link to and across the north of England – you know that thing that’s been planned for decades in parts of the country they recently won votes in and promised to level up. But they won’t vote Tory next time so that doesn’t matter.  Despite his press office saying they were NOT going to sue the newspaper The European for publishing  comments made by him to a colleague that he was experiencing buyer’s remorse over marrying Carrie, Boris continues to appear to be in a covid friendship bubble with everyone in the country when he went to the theatre not wearing a mask after having been asked to wear one. And so as Boris’s Churchill impression cough, stumbles and falls we are faced with the prospect that Starmer is trying to become Clement Attlee with all the post-war promise that shaped the the then Labour Party’s policies on Health, Welfare, Housing, Workers’ rights, Nationalisation, Education and the Economy – you know, all those progressive socialist policies Corbyn espoused and that Starmer has spent his leadership determined to destroy the memory of. After 2 years of Boris’ premiership and on the anniversary of Corbyn’s suspension as a Labour MP, Labour are massively way out in equal with the Tories on 37% of the share of voting intent – it’s going to be a looooooong wait for 2024!

That’s all for this week, thanks for listening!