21 Mar Toupée Fallacy – FT#96
Show Notes
The Toupée Fallacy is a type of Argument from Ignorance where someone doesn’t notice evidence that would prove that they don’t notice confounding evidence, such as when someone claims that all toupées are bad because they’ve never seen a convincing one (possibly because if it was convincing, they wouldn’t know it was a toupée).
Trump
We started out with this Trump tweet:
We followed that with this clip of Trump talking about contractors:
And we even, controversially, included an example from Biden:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Priti Patel’s insistence that she knows what the British people want:
And contrasted that with what the British people say they want:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Wellington Paranormal:
Then we looked at this clip from When Harry Met Sally:
And we finished with this clip from Shockproof:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- The disastrous Green New Deal from AOC — I call them AOC plus 3. We all need to worry because the ocean is going to rise one hundredth of an inch in the next thousand years. This insane woke agenda is killing our country and we have to fight, to the death if necessary, to make sure it never — nothing is more important. So we have to – oh look, it’s my bikers! Bikers for Trump. We love our bikers, what a great group of patriots. They rev their Harleys, vroom, vroom!
- So sometimes I’ll be making a speech and I’ll go home and I’ll check it out on television because I’ll say, like, I wonder how it looks. And there’ll be somebody in the audience behind us that’s so stunning, that’s so handsome or beautiful – handsome or beautiful – that you cannot take your mind or your eyes off that person. And you know sometimes Hollywood calls those people. So we’ve made a lot of really great stars sitting there.
- It’s a lack of respect for a lot of people – a lot of things but it’s just a total lack of respect and it happens to be a man that is just driven. He’s driven to put it together and you look at it and it’s just so ridiculous and so senseless and so horrible. And I say it again and I’ll say it again and again it should have never happened. If he respected our President it would have never ever happened but no one ever mentions the bloody and horrific war raging just across our border.
Click below for the answer
Mark got it wrong again this week, and is still on 49%
Needing a new butt is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the insane story of a Mississippi teacher who was fired for reading a kids book to kids.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Republican misogynists – sorry, I’m repeating myself – Republicans all over America are so excited by the success thus far of Texas’s anti-abortion law that they want one just like it in their state. You’ll be shocked to hear that some of them are so giddy at the thought of controlling women’s bodies that they haven’t put much thought into how, why or pretty much anything else. Take for example Missouri State Representative Brian Seitz, who introduced a bill last week attempting to make it a Class A felony punishable by between 10 and 30 years in prison, to perform an abortion to treat an ectopic pregnancy. For those who don’t know, like say, Republican lawmakers, an ectopic pregnancy is when a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus. They can never result in the birth of a child, but they are super good at killing the mother. Ectopic pregnancies account for almost 2% of all pregnancies in North America and are the number one cause of death for pregnant mothers in the first trimester. When questioned about this Seitz ignorantly claimed that doctors can’t tell if a pregnancy is ectopic, saying “They don’t have the hospital machinery to tell if this is an ectopic pregnancy…They might just think it’s a normal pregnancy and want to abort the child. I would like to see that sort of unlawful activity stopped”. It’s almost like people who know nothing whatsoever about basic healthcare or female anatomy and can’t be bothered to look it up should stay the fuck out of trying to legislate it.
- Tucker Carlson’s status as “beyond Voldemort” insofar as its actually illegal to take anything he says seriously gets another nail in his credibility coffin this week, though being a narcissistic fucking jerk he won’t look at it that way, when the Kremlin said his bulletins were important in the misiniformation war they are blanket bombing their own people with. A leaked memo form the actual Kremlin to state media outlet – you know the kinda outlets that Carlson thinks are lamestream sycophants in the US, says – “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” advises the 12-page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.” The memo includes a quote from Carlson: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighboring Mexico or Canada?”. In the moebius strip that is Carlson’s twisted moral compass at what point does he start ranting at himself for being the tool of Put’n, once he gets passed gazing out of his arse at his own reflection I guess!
- One of my favorite kinds of porn over the past year has been watching insurrectionists get arrested because they filmed themselves insurrecting. Little did I realise that these fuckwits were mere amateurs in the art of self-incrimination. Even that bloke who filmed himself touching the Capitol while saying “This is me, touching the fucking White House” can’t hold a candle to the epic, high-definition, oscar-worthy self-incrimination of Roger Stone, Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keeper Stewart ‘shot myself in the face because I’m a shitty firearms instructor’ Rhodes. These three masters of the craft allowed a documentary film crew to follow them round while they coordinated the attempted overthrow of a democratically decided election. The film “A Storm Foretold”, will be released later this year, but more than 20 hours of footage has already been provided by the documentary crew to the January 6th Committee and to the Washington Post. Someone really should tell Roger Stone that the pardon he got from Trump was only good for crimes he’d committed up to that point.
- In one of those zoom call think tank brainstorming sessions you imagine all critical-thinking Republicans must be holding regularly to discuss tactics strategist Amber Harris was urging the GOP in Michigan to give up trying to overturn the 2020 election during a facebook livestream on Sunday. Robert Regan poised to win a Michigan House seat argued against by ostensibly attempting an analogy. Regan said, “I tell my daughters, ‘Well, if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.’” Nice! Two years prior, in June 2020 his daughter Stephanie’s tweet went viral; “If you’re in Michigan and 18+ pls for the love of god do not vote for my dad for state rep. Tell everyone,” Regan attempted to clarify his statement to The Grand Rapids Press on Monday, saying he was just trying to say you should never stop fighting, even when the outcome seems inevitable, and he wasn’t trying to make a rape joke. “Most people that feel like the election was stolen from them, that’s similar to what they feel like,” Regan blamed his daughter’s stance on her “socialst” college education – but in her own follow-up tweet, Stephanie said the real indoctrination had been at home. “This is what i was raised with!!” she wrote. “Took YEARS to educate myself and feel proud to have diff beliefs, it’s still hard… ask yourself if ur beliefs are truly urs, or if they were implemented by an authoritative figure?” Regan doesn’t make these misogynist comments despite being a “father of daughters” he deliberately treats his daughters as tools to prop his comments up which is of course the essence of misogyny itself.
- In possibly the least surprising turn of events since Tom Cruise divorced Katie Holmes, Trump did a crime! But more surprisingly, this time it might actually matter. Mere hours after we recorded our last episode, the January 6th Committee made a federal court filing which indicated they have good reason to believe Trump is guilty of engaging “in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States”. The filing was a response to Trump legal advisor John Eastman’s attempt to assert attorney client privilege over 90,000 documents that the committee would really like to look at. They give seven reasons that privilege doesn’t apply, which include such airtight legal arguments such as an unsigned letter of engagement doesn’t prove you’re Trump’s lawyer; You sent all these emails from a college email server whose policy specifically says you have no expectation of privacy; your supposed client Mr Trump has repeatedly waived privilege by talking to everyone including Bob Woodward about this stuff; and most important of all, you can’t claim privilege while you’re helping your client commit fraud. If you need convincing that this is different to the 6 or 700 other crimes Trump committed, and let’s face it, who could blame you, I strongly advise you to listen to episode 574 of the Opening Arguments podcast, and if you do, even you might believe that one day we’ll see the Donald in a jumpsuit that matches his face.
- Is it any wonder the Kremlin sent that memo about Tucker Carlson (*hoik spit*) in an on-air display of utter smug fuckwittery he lambasted Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland for noting during Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that “Russian propaganda groups” are spreading “information about how they have uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to unleash biological weapons in the country.” and thereby Carlson completed the circle of disinformation.
Unpaid Russian propagandist and QAnon legitimizer and rhymes with Fucker drew conclusions for no one’s benefit; “So what you are saying, Victoria Nuland, if, for example, you were funding secret bio-labs in Ukraine but wanted to hide that fact from the people who were paying for it in whose name you are doing it, then you might lie about it by claiming the Russians were lying about it. In other words, you might mount a disinformation campaign by claiming the other guy was mounting a disinformation campaign. Is that what you are saying, Victoria Nuland?”. Sensible centrist Steve Bannon got a bit fired up asking the CIA and Defense department “What are they creating? Are we involved in any way? Have we financed it? Are we partners? Do we actually know what’s going on?”. No Steve you don’t. And equally level-headed calm-thinker Mike Flynn wrote over Telegram “I was told that biolabs in Ukraine was a conspiracy theory yet here we are. They are now admitting it openly.” No no they’re not its just Tucker the fucker!!! Listen Komrade Karlson, come the revolution a) it won’t be televised so no one will be able to see you and b) Putin’s not gonna roll a red carpet out for you to thank you for all the work you’ve done for him. We in England still have Traitor’s Gate through which the likes of you were taken to the Tower of old, no tv reception in there either! - Dishonest Republicans – sorry, I’m repeating myself again – Republicans have been trying to convince us all that election tampering is a real issue for a while now, and the length some of them will go to is kind of impressive. Like, in the case of Mesa Colorado County Clerk Tina Peters, tampering with elections herself. So committed was Peters, that in the process of proving just how easy it is to subvert an election, she committed seven felonies and three misdemeanors according to the Grand Jury who indicted her this month. Essentially, Peters and her deputy, who is also charged with various crimes, arranged for security cameras to be turned off during the software update of the Dominion Voting machines, stole the identity of an IT contractor, made a copy of the voting machines hard drive, and published images that included confidential passwords for the county’s election equipment on right wing websites. Weirdly, she still hasn’t dropped out of the race she’s currently in to become Secretary of State – you know, the person who is in charge of running elections in Colorado. Sure it’s bad, but imagine how much worse it would be if these people were actually any good at criming!
- In British Politics this week, equipped with the new post-Brexit ability to do adult things they thought they couldn’t do when part of the EU, the UK government simply reverted to childishly saying “ner ner ner ner ner to Europe cos we did things faster and bigger than you”. Dimestore pantomime Uriah Heap Jacob Rees-Mogg proudly showed off a chart illustrating just how many more oligarch assets they had frozen than the combined EU and all the US, only to have it pointed out by oh I don’t know – EVERYONE that that simply showed that this UK Government had been laundering billions more dirty Russian money than anyone else. Michael Gove Slimy Tove gyred, gimballed and postured in parliament demanding that oligarchs’ empty London mansions should be seized and used to house Ukrainian refugees. Professional squatters took him at his word and got into Oleg Deripaska’s 200-bedroom city block of a building in London’s Belgravia and erected a banner over the balcony quoting Gove. Police of course arrived in minutes and arrests were made cos Gove obviously didn’t mean straight away, “you’ve got to give them some chance to sell up and move their assets out of the country, be fair!” Meanwhile out of the country Boris visited Saudi Arabia to find an alternative to Russian fuel, and, whilst at the same time declaring Putin guilty of crimes against humanity, ignored the small matter of 81 beheadings happening in Saudi Arabia mere days before he arrived. Lesser of two evils? Better the devil you know? or who’s got money that we can suck up to now to fund the party? Whatever happened to COP26’s net zero renewables? “We didn’t mean straight away obviously…” – yes thank you Gove!
That’s all for this week, thanks for listening!
