Reason #3,547: It’s a cult!

The beauty of mathematics is there will always be a single correct answer, and everything else is WRONG. 

No room for interpretation; no “it depends on what you mean by…” One right answer and nothing else.

Say what you like about Bobby Kennedy Jr, Mehmet Oz and Howard Lutnick. I certainly do. None of them are actually stupid.

 

RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'" Trump: "Right"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 24, 2026 at 5:28 AM

And yet look at Lutnick and Oz nodding along as Kennedy – a lawyer by trade, where you can get any answer you want depending on how you ask the question – presents a mathematical argument that wouldn’t pass muster with a 6^th grader, much less your bank manager. Try it out if you don’t believe me.

They all know it’s stupid but they dutifully agree because the god king must not be shown to be wrong.

Tell me again it’s not a cult. 

Update:

The brilliant Stonekettle, Jim Wright, goes further, taking us into Godwin territory and with good reason.

There is a scene in The West Wing (and yes, I KNOW it’s a fantasy – that’s why I like it!) where Bartlett and his chief of staff test a new staffer by telling him something they know is untrue to see if he has the courage to speak truth to power and tell the president he is wrong.

The staffer passes the test. Yes, I told you it’s a fantasy.

If the Trump administration had the wit to apply such a test, the staffer would surely have been fired.

This is important because if the administration is filled with people who don’t have the backbone to correct the president about their own frigging shoe size, if they volunteer to invent a bullshit branch of mathematics as justification for their leader pulling a number out of his arse, who is going to tell him that his justification for attacking Iran was a fever dream? Who is going to tell him his tariffs and wars have led to higher prices, not lower? Who is going to tell him the only golden age America is seeing right now is Trump’s ongoing bedazzling of the White House?

It’s not as if this has all started recently. This is the man who told us in 2020 that Covid would disappear like, and this is a direct quote, a miracle. This is the man who suggested disinfectant or ultra violet light could be applied internally to treat Covid. And people still took him seriously.

The difference then was that there were still a few serious people in the US government who were willing to say it straight. That forced him to save face by claiming he was joking. Because a global pandemic is a big joke, isn’t it? I laughed. Did you?

If he did it today, tomorrow he would push Kennedy and Oz up to the podium to give a made up medical reason why injecting Lysol is just fine. And they would do it even though at least one of them knows it’s bullshit.

Despite some recent pushback from his base, there are still more than enough people willing to believe whatever the MAGA king says despite the evidence of their own eyes and lives. If you disagree and present your reasoning, they will just spew out some waffle about the woke left and legacy media.

 

We are not getting close to claiming the president’s Big Beautiful New Suit is invisible to those not smart enough to see it. We’re way beyond it.

If you have to turn off the rational thinking part of your brain in order for your politics to make sense, you’re doing both wrong.

Jim Wright’s comparison with the last days of the führer is a valid one, because those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  

 

 

 

The line you won’t cross

When the current US president tried to Trumpsplain Catholicism to, um, the Pope(!) I commented on one post that he has officially entered his Henry VIII phase. 

Well, I was wrong.

You see, when Henry VIII had a beef with the Vatican, his response was ‘Fuck you, I’M the Pope now!’

Within hours, Trump has upped the ante to ‘Fuck you, I’m JESUS now!’ 

And to their great credit, his base are not happy about it.

A lot of people who chose to be on the right side of history from the beginning and follow the Jesus parts in the Bible are looking at the blowback from MAGAworld and saying, “Really? Of all the fundamentally un-Christian and blasphemous behaviour, that’s the line you won’t cross?”

It’s a fair comment but I don’t mind. I say it’s okay to do the right thing for the wrong reason. It would be better to do the right thing for the right reason, but so long as you’re doing the right thing, that’s progress and I welcome it.

If Trump has done anything for the world, it’s to show us exactly where everyone’s line in the sand is.

Be it sexual assault, bankrupting businesses, palling around with a known pdf, felony fraud (x34), refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election, inciting his mob to trash the capitol, stealing classified documents, calling journalists enemies of the state, filling the Cabinet with his favourite television personalities, belligerent expansionism, insulting allies, tantrums over bad press, building monuments to himself, hiring untrained goons who shoot citizens in the streets, starting a new foreign regime-change war after running on a platform of exactly not that, higher fuel prices, or sharing A.I. slop portraying himself as a Christ-like figure…

This will be Trump’s true legacy. Everyone alive from 2016 onwards will be partly defined by when and how they realised he’s a second-rate charlatan. Or if they did at all.

This time, it isn’t just a token expression of disapproval. Between this and the war, many of his supporters are openly wondering whether they’ve been conned, and questioning whether they ever should have believed him against all observable reality. This is fine. Some are even wondering if he’s the Anti-Christ.

And there will no doubt be others who see this as the god king’s genius at 40-dimensional chess. For sure, this is all part of the administration flooding the zone because – as I will expand upon in a future post – stupidity is easier to process than evil.

To those who are belatedly realising it, no shame, no judgement. Welcome back to reality.

All I ask is that you learn from this experience and act on what you’ve learnt.

 

And THIS is why you don’t let a 6x bankrupt run a country

 

Think the bankruptcies and the idiocy over attacking Iran aren’t connected?

Well, let’s think it through…

Okay, so the bankruptcies were technically legal and he used the system to his advantage so that makes him smart.

Whatever. That’s not the point.

The point is this is a man who is used to having someone else come in and clean up the mess he’s made while he wipes the slate clean and merrily staggers on to his next inevitable fuckup.

Look at his history. You know it’s true.

In fact, it’s this very appalling lack of consequences for decades of hubristic malfeasance that makes him a hero to many.

Turns out international relations don’t work that way. Who knew?

 

As that well-known anti-American radical leftist Colin “I’m not reading this, it’s bullshit” Powell said, You break it, you own it.

You wouldn’t drive your car into someone’s house and then expect them to fix the damage for you. Mind you, this numb nut possibly would.

My suggestion to the US administration is to take the advice of one of MAGA’s favourite thinkers: Clean your room!

 

How about we stop using soldiers’ lives as a thought experiment?

 

As the second Trump administration did the totally bloody thinkable and started a war with Iran, many are digging up old, and not so old comments from Trump and his cronies about how Obama and then Biden and then Harris were going to [checks notes] start a war with Iran.

The hypocrisy is a given and it will not hurt the administration one bit. They revel in it and their supporters love them for it. That’s not the point.

Ever since Vietnam, war has become an entirely abstract concept to the greater American populace, and to most of the westernised world for that matter. That was the last war where most people had a human connection. Since then, war is just something that happens to other people. Say “God bless our troops,” and you’ve done your bit. Paying taxes to make sure they’re properly equipped and supported if and when they return? That’s communism.

During the last Iraq war (and just think about that opening for a moment), when PBS Newshour showed the names and pictures of those killed in that war at the end of each bulletin, even that was labelled left wing bias. Apparently supporting the troops means keeping them nameless and faceless.

Even the president – any president, with or without appropriate headwear – having a photo-op with a coffin keeps the occupant anonymous. Do you know the name or face of the person in the box the president was saluting? Didn’t think so.

It’s said that the first rule of war is to dehumanise the enemy. It’s easier to kill someone if you don’t think they are a fellow human being who was thrown into this situation through no fault of their own just like you were.

If that’s true, then the second rule of modern war is to dehumanise your own side. It’s easier to get the people at home on board with “Send the Marines,” and “America, Fuck Yeah!” if you treat them as mere equipment, and not actual human beings. And it’s best to let the people think it’s a true volunteer army and not point out the fact that many of them have literally bet their life on a better future because they saw no other way. It’s not conscription if you do it by stealth.

And this is why PBS was accused of bias in honouring the dead. Giving a human face to the people whose lives are wasted in another international pissing contest isn’t good for the polls.

This is also why those who oppose a war with Iran – and up until a week ago, this included all of MAGAworld – invoke “your sons,” just as senior White House Ghoul Stephen Miller did in October 2024.

Predictably, and rightly, opponents of the administration clapped back:

But what do you notice about both sets of comments?

They’re still taking about other people. Whether it’s “your sons,” or “our kids,” they’re still talking about other people. The only difference is one of the appeals to empathy comes from people who are on record saying empathy is a weakness.

None of them have any real skin in the game. They know it won’t be their kids and they’re still using other people’s kids as a tactic, not as real people.

The most offensive aspect of this debate – and it’s a trap anti-war people fall into as well – is treating those who are sent to war as entirely hypothetical, without any agency of their own.

It’s true that soldiers have no agency in what they are sent to do. That’s how the military works. And as mentioned above, many had very little agency in volunteering to sacrifice that agency. But they are real people. They have hopes, and dreams, and they vote.

So if we really care about the lives of those who are sent to war, and those who may be, whether it’s because we want them to win or kept out of harm’s way in the first place, how about we start by not treating them as a mere thought experiment? How about we stop treating an entire generation as an emotional bargaining chip, whatever the objective may be?

On phobia vs scepticism

John Cleese has issued a few tweets over recent weeks suggesting that a better word for what is often called Islamophobia should be called Islamosceptic. 

Dr Cleese has had a few bad takes in his time but a look at his feed shows he’s mostly on the right side. I can respect anyone whose opinion on any given subject isn’t instantly predictable based on their other opinions, and I wish to take him up on his point in the intellectual spirit it was offered in. 

I accept Dr Cleese’s definition of a phobia as an “irrational over-reaction, as with spiders.”

Here’s the problem:

We are not always rational about what makes something rational or irrational.

I have two major phobias – heights, and large bodies of water.

I have argued (albeit facetiously) that being afraid of falling to my doom from a great height or drowning in the ocean are perfectly rational fears.

However, history has shown us that so long as the risks are respected and proper safety procedures followed, there is no rational reason to be afraid of either. That doesn’t stop my balls from shrinking up towards my intestines any time I’m in such a situation – or even when I see such a situation on television. In fact, media induced trauma has a lot to do with what we’re talking about and we’ll get to that a little later.

Perhaps I should call myself an acrosceptic.

I’m none too fond of spiders either, but where-ever possible I live and let live.

So while John’s points about ‘phobia’ being an emotive term which implies irrationality, and scepticism being a indispensable part of scientific method are well taken, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

For example: there are people who disagree with the interpretation of scientific data on human induced climate change which is accepted by 97% of climate scientists.

While I may butt up against the appeal to authority fallacy here, this is not a rational position for anyone who is not a climate scientist to take. Yet those who adopt it get to call themselves “climate sceptics.”

To be a climate ‘sceptic’ today is not to hold a rational doubt in pursuit of the truth. This is shown in the way most of their arguments are non-scientific, from conspiracy theories to “it was cold where I live last week.”

None of this fits a valid definition of ‘sceptic.’ But it would be wrong to call them sciencephobes. They are not scared of science per se. They happily accept air travel, pain killers, plastics, the internet. Some even accept vaccines.

No, they only fear science when the science is inconvenient to them. Or not even to them, but to those they have been listening to. For, what is there to fear from mitigating climate change? Renewable energy sources? Cleaner air and water? New industries and employment opportunities?

To find a rational fear of reducing climate change, we have to look to who has the most to lose from it. That is, of course, those who profit the most from the fossil fuel industry. And it turns out, a lot of them own media companies too. Those who don’t directly own media companies make large contributions to those who do.

I’m not saying it’s only the fat cats who benefit from the fossil fuels industry. There are thousands, if not millions of oil rig workers and miners who will have to retrain and find other jobs if we do this properly. Just as there were thousands of workers in the photographic film industry whose jobs evaporated in a space of about five years. Unless you thought for five seconds about their plight before ditching your instamatic for a digicam and then an iPhone, I respectfully ask that you pipe down about job losses.

Now that we have discussed phobia vs scepticism on a less emotive example than religion, let’s return to whether we should be saying Islamophobe or Islamosceptic.

The problem with both terms is they treat Islam as a monolith, which is it not, any more than Christianity, conservatism, or Collingwood supporters.

To question the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad, and the tenets of the Quran is to be sceptical. It is not just part of scientific thinking but also theological thinking.

To fear for your safety because you saw someone on public transport in religious garb is irrational and can correctly be described as a phobia. The same goes for assuming a mosque is a terrorist hub for no other reason than that it is a mosque.

We all know (well, most of us do) that the antics of the Westboro Baptist Church (Hey! They call it a church!) is not broadly representative of Christianity, despite the disproportionate amount of media coverage they receive. To assume it is would be phobic, not sceptic. 

Dr Cleese makes the very valid point that Life of Brian is in no way Christophobic. But based on his own explanation, he would be right to take umbrage at the film being called Christosceptic too. As he says, it is not sceptical of Christianity, just certain types of Christians. 

Valid criticism of Westboro has nothing to with criticising Christianity. This much is obvious. What apparently isn’t so obvious is that criticism Islam as a whole is a long way from criticising how certain adherents practice particular facets of their faith.

It’s a pity that no one seems to be able to tell the difference.