Amazing Familiarity – FT#91

12 Jan Amazing Familiarity – FT#91

Show Notes

The Amazing Familiarity Fallacy is committed when someone makes an argument based on information they couldn’t possibly have, such as what someone else is thinking.

Trump

We started out with this clip of Trump claiming to know what the Founding Fathers wanted:

We followed that with this clip of Trump falsely claiming nobody has ever said they love a politician before:

Then we talked about Kevin McCarthy claiming knowledge of why people voted for Biden:

And finally we talked about this amazing claim from Kayleigh McEnany:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about this clip of Boris claiming to know how hard regular people have found lockdowns:

Then he talked about all these people who claim to know what the rest of the world envies about Britain:

Fallacy in the Wild

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

Then we discussed this clip from Elementary.

Fake News

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

1. Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naive or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye — or perhaps another body part.
2. Psychologists will tell you that some women want to be treated with respect, others differently. I tell friends who treat their wives magnificently, get treated like crap in return, ‘Be rougher and you’ll see a different relationship.’ Unfortunately, with people in general, you get more with vinegar than honey.
3. I said to my friend, a very rich, very successful guy, I said ‘Why are you with your wife?’ You know he had a lot of money, he could have got a really attractive wife, but she was like a four, at best. Very flat chested. If she lost 40 pounds maybe a five, but she seemed like a nice person. He didn’t have an answer.

Click below for the answer

Mark got it right this week, and is now on 52%

A year of Q Anon failures is not a logical fallacy

We talked about all the crazy predictions Q Anoners made last year, many (*cough* all *cough*) of which didn’t come true.

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

• Among the latest people to have their phone records subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee is pillow huckster and Dollar Store Cliff Clavin, Mike Lindell. Like most cowardly right wingers who know they probably broke the law, Lindell has sued to keep his records private, and the reason his lawsuit cites is that enforcing the subpoena would violate his rights to “freedom of religion, speech, press, political expression, and to associate with others to advance their shared beliefs” Now I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I’m pretty sure a couple of those aren’t rights as such, I’m very sure that they aren’t violated by requiring Verizon to show the committee who he called and when, and I don’t know where the fuck freedom of religion comes into any of it, or for that matter, freedom of the press, since Lindell is a pillow salesman and a nutter, but not a reporter.
• A year ago last week Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, appalled at the events of January 6th, declared on the Senate floor: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” Fast forward a year and Biden recalls those same events in an address, and calls them out for what they were denouncing the lies spread by Trump and his acolytes fomenting violence in seeking to overturn the election in his favor. And Graham, ever mindful of the Right not doing irony tweeted “What brazen politicization of January 6 by President Biden,”. Err what? Durrr – as if a violent and deadly insurrection that involved an angry mob storming the seat of government intending to kill Mike Pence in support of recrowning the losing former leader of another political party wasn’t itself THE and I mean THE politicization of January 6th – y’know the day when the senate ratifies the votes for the newly elected president! What the fuck? Helpfully those that do get irony took to Graham’s small blue bird feed to ask such things as “Is the idea here that the riot itself was apolitical?”  point out that “attempted coups are political”. Although one Michael Harriot nodded sagely in agreement adding “Joe Biden should be ashamed of politicizing the political rally in the headquarters of American politics that devolved into political violence by interrupting politicians carrying out the political process of choosing the country’s political leader. Shame on him.” Yeah he’s sure our kind of people – Michael Harriot that is – not Lindsey Graham!
• Remember a couple of years ago when Matt Gaetz told that story about his adopted adult son and for a while everyone was like “even if he hasn’t done anything wrong as such, this is pretty fucking weird”? Well, it’s Madison Cawthorn’s turn. Hitler fan and fiction novel lover Cawthorn has recently announced that he and his wife of less than a year are splitting up, and an old video surfaced of him telling the Daily Caller how they got together, and it’s super fucking weird. I’ll let him tell it….

Who among us can honestly say we haven’t been tricked into meeting a woman by being invited to a fake crossfit competition by an American soldier we met in a Russian casino?  An illegal Russian casino, presumably, since the nearest legal casino to St Petersburg is 960 miles away. Quite a weird holiday excursion as well, when you’re vacationing in Sweden, since the only ferry service from Stockholm to St Petersburg sails once per week and takes 38 and a half hours to get there. Other than that, totally normal story, and I’m sure that’s exactly how it happened.
• Okay folks listening at home please adopt the tiny violin playing stance – and I believe the tune of choice for adding accompaniment to the downfall of idiots is “Hearts and Flowers” you know the one that goes, to indicate how sad we all feel really deep down under the guffaws and belly laughs. Why? Because those ace-detectives-of-electoral-fraud Cyber Ninjas are shutting up shop and closing down for good! Ever the brave-faced spokesperson Rod Thompson bullishly said on behalf of CyberNinjas “$2 million debt from the Arizona audit and endless legal and character attacks on the company by those who opposed the audit make it untenable moving forward.” Of course it’s nothing to do with their shoddy practices, partisan stance, CEO tweeting conspiracy shite, not finding anything of note, having no experience in the field and Maricopa officials concluding that out of any findings they did find 76 of their 77 claims were false or misleading. Oh and nothing to do of course either with a judge in Maricopa County holding the company in contempt and ordering it to pay $50,000 per day in sanctions for failing to provide records related to the so-called audit to the Arizona Republic Newspaper. No no nothing to do with that, the decision to shut down was made “well before” the judge’s ruling Thomson said – adding under his breath “so ner ner ner ner ner” like a true electoral professional.
• As Hans Gruber so wisely says to Theo in Die Hard, Christmas is a time of miracles, and just before Christmas Trump showed just how true that is by being the sane, responsible one in a conversation with another human. Admittedly, the other human was Candace Owens, so the bar could barely be lower, but honestly I’m impressed that a bar even exists that is low enough for Trump to clear.  Owens was doing her usual sanity baiting shtick, suggesting vaccines are not only unhelpful, but actively dangerous, and that more people died of Covid in 2021 than in 2020. Ok, Trump didn’t point out that for a good chunk of 2020 it hadn’t had time to spread everywhere, but he did say that vaccines work, and that most of the people who are dying are the ones who refuse to take vaccines. Yeah, he didn’t acknowledge that most of those people are antivaxxers because of him, but come on, miracles aren’t THAT powerful.
• We all know how Trump pretty much governed by Fox News – he loved appearing on the show and bleating on about the sad state of modern America like the unsavoury racist misogynist uncle no one likes to be stuck sat next to over Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Fox News soon figured out that they could alter policy by talking about things Trump had no idea about – so that’s everything then – when they could see from where they were broadcasting from across the lawn, that he was watching. Turns out in a Washington Post report that it was worse than that, and possibly actually worse than Nixon taping everything. Apparently Trump used to dial Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs into Oval Office staff meetings! Indeed so close was the relationship that the committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot revealed that Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, and Hannity all texted Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows as the president’s supporters stormed the Capitol. “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham wrote. If only Laura had had the good sense to channel one or two of Trump’s other TV *cough cough* triumphs and told him “you know where the lobby is sir – Down the hall to the left”. Or simply “You’re Fired”. 
• As we know, Republicans love Alpha males who stand up to authority and aren’t afraid to say what they think. You know, people like Ted Cruz. Ok, sure, Ted did crumble like a little bitch and praise the man who called his wife ugly and his father a murderer, but that was probably a one off.  I mean, yeah, he did blame his daughters when he was caught running off to Cancun while the citizens of his state froze without any power, but any Alpha male would hide behind a couple of teenage girls rather than admit they were an ineffectual piece of shit with no real power to help anyone. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, Cruz is a strong, principled guy who knows right from wrong and, thanks to his years as a tough on crime prosecutor, knows what terrorists are when he sees them. 18 times since last January, he has described the insurrection that he helped foment as a terrorist attack, and he won’t back down from that stance.  You know, unless Tucker Carlson tells him to. In which case, he’ll backtrack, apologise, claim he messed up and beg for mercy like the snivelling little, slimy, shitty-bearded, spineless cuck he is, because Tucker decides what’s true and what isn’t, no matter what any judge says about his show.
• Well the Virus is over and Boris has won – desperate to distract us from yet more revelations about his not following the rules about social gatherings  during lockdown and not strictly telling the truth to the independent (though appointed by him) investigator into whether he asked a Tory donor to pay for his wallpaper, Boris Johnson has decided to hedge his bets on Omicron helping him bring about the end of the pandemic, how? Well he’s going to reduce the isolation time after testing positive from 7 days to 5 days, that is those self-same 5 days that most people are still testing positive during, so they can stop shirking and get back to work to pay for the national insurance tax hike to pay for the furlough scheme, and the increased heating fuel charges to generate enough VAT to create a windfall large enough for Rishi Sunak to be able to give that to the people suffering from not being able to afford to pay the national insurance tax hike and the increased fuel bills. Also Boris is doing away with free lateral flow tests so people won’t know whether they are positive so they won’t have to isolate at all, you know exactly the opposite of which allowed his government to swiftly plan a non-response to the size of the Omicron outbreak. Ah dear Dominic Cummings we so miss your guiding hand on the tiller, steering us away from the ignorant path of herd immunity and letting the bodies pile up, no no we don’t!!! Still could be worse Liz Truss could be within shouting distance of the Prime Minister job…oh no wait aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!

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