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June 19, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
25:27
Episode 110 - How the King and Queen are Sacrificing the Pawns
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Time Text
I think you know the words.
Sing along.
Pum pum pum Pum pum pum The best thing about the words, they can be in any order you want.
They can be louder, they can be quieter.
But come in here, and it's time to share a simultaneous sip.
A simultaneous sip.
Usually, the first time I talk in the morning is to you.
And it doesn't always go so well.
The first few sentences, they sound like, I'm sorry I have a simultaneous sip.
But after a while, and after I have my simultaneous sip, I can speak properly.
Shall we? Oh yeah, that's good.
How many of you saw my interview with Lara Trump that the President shared on Facebook yesterday?
So if you haven't seen it, you can see it in my Twitter feed.
Or you can go to President Trump's Facebook page and you'll see my interview with Lara Trump.
But while I'm talking about that and everybody's coming in, So, in this chess game that we've all been observing about the border, it feels like we've got a king and a queen.
You already know which player is the king and which is the queen, figuratively speaking, talking about the sides.
And both of them are using the pawns, sacrificing the pawns.
Now, how many of you saw, is it Secretary Nielsen?
Is that the right title?
Homeland Security?
And she did a presser and answered some questions.
And I had a number of, if you haven't seen it, The Nielsen response where she explained the border situation and then took some questions.
It was really good entertainment.
I'm not sure if it was in a good way, but it was hard to look away.
I'll tell you some of the things that I came away with from that.
Nielsen, yeah, you know, you're seeing very different opinions on Nielsen's performance.
Some say it was amazing, some say it wasn't.
But this is just your standard two movies situation.
I'll tell you what I saw.
Wow, is she smart.
I don't know if you had the same response, but she had a total command of the details, seemed to have completely mastered the situation, seemed like she knew every part of it was in control.
I would say, impressive, you know, just as a human being, she was really impressive.
But, that said, boy did she get mad.
She was mad.
Now, I liked that too, but it was a little harder to watch.
Because I liked how mad she was, because she was mad at the, you know, probably some combination of the situation and the questions that were being asked were maddening.
One of the questions being asked was, I think it was at CBS, Who asked, why isn't this child abuse?
Why isn't it child abuse?
What the hell kind of do you still beat your spouse question is that?
Now, what would have been a fair question would be, there's a child and something happened to that child.
What are you going to do about that?
Or are you okay with that?
That sort of thing. But as soon as you label it child abuse and challenge her to describe why it isn't, she was smart enough not to take the bait, so she didn't answer the question directly, which would have been a huge mistake.
So again, she took the right path.
But wow!
That was some prickly...
Prickly, thorny territory that she was navigating.
Now if you're judging her performance, you're going to have to, I think, put it in context.
Not many people could have gotten through that situation.
I mean, put anybody in that situation and they're just going to go down like the Titanic.
I think she survived it, which was probably the best you could do in that situation.
That was a tough, tough situation.
But I was also trying to understand the situation.
And did you understand it?
For those of you who watched Nielsen's, I don't know what you'd call it, speech slash press conference, how many of you understood it when she was done?
Because I kept... My feeling the whole way through would be...
She would explain something and I'd say, Oh, okay, I didn't know that.
That's good to know.
I'm putting the pieces together.
Oh, finally, I'm starting to understand this.
But the whole time, when I thought I was understanding it, I was also generating as many questions at the same time as I was getting understanding.
And something like...
There was some kind of change or court change or something that caused us to, us meaning the United States, to have to get tougher on immigration and to go to zero tolerance because the alternative, given this complicated set of other things, was to just let anybody in who wanted to come in with a kid and they just go free.
That was my understanding, that the only alternative was something very close to an open border.
And that something had changed, but I didn't quite understand what.
The Ninth Circuit?
Ninth Circus, somebody says.
But I didn't quite understand what that change was.
So it didn't quite, in the end...
I still sat there saying, I don't know how to explain this.
If somebody asked me why did they go to zero tolerance, I just wouldn't have a great answer to that based on Nielsen's explanation, only because it was complicated and there were parts I would have needed to ask questions about.
But here's something I did get out of it.
See if you have the same impression.
We have a situation where there are two bad choices.
Right? There's no good choices.
My understanding is we don't have a good choice and a bad choice.
We have two bad choices.
Is everybody with me on that?
That there are only two bad choices.
Right? Let me see if we're at least on the same page.
Right, they're just two bad choices.
So the anti-Trumpers have been getting away with saying that they chose a bad choice.
And the people making the bad choice are saying, we know, we know, we know it's a bad choice.
The other choice is worse.
That never works, because then they just say, well, can you defend all of your child abusing?
And then you're just off the rails, right?
So as long as you have two bad choices, the critics can, you know, they have infinite ammunition, because they'll just talk about your bad choice, even though the other one might have been worse.
Now here's the, let's see, the depths to which the anti-Trumpers will go.
They've actually sided with child trafficking.
In order to be on the other side from the president, they've taken a firm stand in favor of child trafficking.
I'm not exaggerating.
Am I? Because there are only two choices.
More child trafficking or more kids in cages crying.
Am I wrong?
Now, I could be wrong, right?
Because this is a gigantic, you know, bullshit situation where everybody involved is lying and shading and leaving out part of the story and, you know, shading it.
But that's what I see.
I might be wrong, but I think you only have a choice between more child trafficking or more children in cages crying.
Which do you choose?
I take children crying in cages.
Children crying in cages?
Sign me up for that one.
Because the alternative is to be on the child trafficking side.
Am I wrong?
Doesn't it boil down to those two sides?
Now, these are the things that everybody's saying.
I'm just putting it in the two choices.
Because I think the administration has made the mistake of trying to paint what they're doing as good.
Because that's what one does, right?
You don't say what we're doing is bad.
You say, well, what we're doing is good.
But you can't make the case.
Because there was no good in this situation.
There was no good choice. Nobody wants a kid in a freaking cage.
Nobody wants to separate parents and children.
So they're trying to defend a losing position.
There were only two losing positions and those were the only choices.
Do you favor kids in cages crying?
Or do you favor a big increase in child trafficking?
No other choices.
Somebody says, Scott, you're wrong.
Well, wrong in what way?
Because my understanding is if we went back to the other way of doing it, The Obama way, we would experience more of what we've recently experienced, which is a 300 something percent increase in people coming with kids that may or may not be their kids.
Now there is a statistic that I don't know, and maybe you do.
Somebody can help me on this.
For every hundred kids that come over in this situation, the ones who do not go through a port of entry, but they try to get asylum and they're coming in through the situation that is causing the kids in cages, what percentage of them do we ultimately figure out are actually related to the parents?
Has anybody seen that statistic?
Because what I don't know is, are 95% of them actually with their actual parents?
Or are half of them just child trafficking kind of situation?
Has anybody seen that statistic?
I haven't seen a statistic on that.
And I would think that that's a pretty important point.
Now, I saw Secretary Nielsen, I think it was her, say that if you don't like the current Trump zero tolerance, that because of the problems with the law, the only other alternative is open borders.
Did you hear that?
So Nielsen was saying, we only have one other choice.
And it's open borders.
Persuasion fail.
Fail. Alright?
Here's what she tried to sell.
Here's what she was trying to sell.
Kids in cages separated from their parents crying.
That's one alternative.
That's the one they've picked. Versus open borders.
Open borders.
Open borders.
Or, shall I say it this way?
Ah! Open borders.
That feels good.
I like the feeling that it's open.
There are no restrictions.
Open borders.
Ah! Versus what was the other alternatives?
Kids in cages, crying, ripped from their parents.
I hate that one.
I hate that one. Tell me again, what's the alternative?
Open borders.
I like openness.
Now, the whole point of open borders Is what was that Nielsen was trying to paint open borders as being a kind of a holocaust, well that's too much, kind of a disaster situation.
But if you're going to call something a disaster, don't call it open borders.
I love open borders.
It sounds like a positive.
Do you know what doesn't sound like a positive?
Kids in cages ripped from their parents' arms.
This baby couldn't even nurse.
It's crying. This baby is being, you know, permanently damaged.
Or, or, open borders.
Terrible persuasion fail.
Fail, fail, fail.
How about this choice? Kids in cages, temporarily, crying, we don't like it, compared to child trafficking.
Why do we put them in the cages?
To keep them safe, because the alternative is child trafficking.
That's a little bit better, right?
If you're trying to sell these, you know, which is the less worse situation...
Less worse is less child trafficking.
More kids in cages crying.
How many of you...
I've made it a point not to listen to the...
There's an audio of kids crying, or a kid, I don't know how many kids, crying at one of the facilities.
How many of you listen to that?
While I take a sip.
Somebody says, I'm the one failing on persuasion this morning.
I welcome you to tell me why.
Because, you know, I started out by saying that the situation is sufficiently complicated that I don't really know what's going on here.
I think I sort of almost do, but I'm not sure I do.
So if somebody has something factual that they would like to correct me on, I'm open to that.
I think I've been corrected quite a few times on this topic already, and I welcome that because I would actually like to understand the topic.
I hear.
All right.
Yeah.
Here's why I'm probably not going to listen to it if I can avoid it.
I'm talking about the audio of kids crying because it's just manipulative.
It's just manipulative.
That's all it is.
Because, have you ever been around a child?
Children cry, and they will go frickin' nuts if they can't find their teddy bear or whatever.
Kids cry like it's the end of the world for a lot of different things.
If you put a bunch of kids in any one area, you're gonna get a crier.
Somebody's going to fall down and scrape a knee, and it's going to sound like daycare, somebody's saying.
So I choose not to listen to it because it would bias me, but I know that it wouldn't tell me something that was useful in this case.
Do you even have children?
I've had stepchildren, so I've been around a lot of crying children, yes.
What about parents tossing their kids away?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Five of six kids don't arrive with parents.
Yeah. Yeah, I thought...
So, Secretary Nielsen did point out angrily that something like 10,000 out of the 12,000 kids were unaccompanied minors.
But it was a weak point.
Because... People weren't complaining about that.
People were not complaining about kids who came without parents.
Of course you have to detain them or hold them in some way.
So she made a strong point on a point that wasn't the main point.
It was useful background. It was good context.
But nobody was talking about that group.
They were talking about the group who came with something that looked like a parent.
Uh... You enjoy it, Nazi.
So, the people who prefer child trafficking are coming in to give me some hard time.
Anybody you call...
That explains it. No children, Nazi.
So somebody's calling me a Nazi because I've said the choices are between children in cages crying temporarily and child trafficking.
So the pro-child trafficking people have come in to give me a hard time.
Only two choices.
No one ever talks about how long they're at the facility.
I thought people would talk about that all the time.
So does it matter, somebody's saying, does it matter if people are not talking about the trafficking?
Well, it's crazy not to frame the story the way you actually see it.
In this case, framing it as, do you prefer child trafficking or do you prefer some kids in cages crying for a little while?
That's a valid...
Isn't that valid, by the way?
That is exactly why we're putting him in the cages, right?
The... The other situations are, and I think it's probably a mistake to talk about the laundry list of reasons.
It's like, well, under this situation, we wouldn't separate them.
And under this situation, we wouldn't.
But under this situation, we would.
But under this situation, we wouldn't.
However, under this situation, we might, but we wouldn't.
Everybody gets lost in all that.
It kind of comes down to which do you choose of these two bad alternatives.
Alright, just looking at your Yeah, so let's talk about the Space Force.
I was getting worried about, not rationally, but, you know, sometimes you worry about things that are not rational.
I was getting worried about, you know, China coming to dominate, you know, the seas around China, you know, the South China Sea and all that.
And I thought, well, is that bad that their military...
The scope of control increases.
I don't know. Do they want to dominate the world?
Is that going to be bad for us in a variety of ways?
It might be. You don't know.
And then, instead of defending the sea, which would be hard because they have the home court advantage over there, Trump decided to dominate space.
And, you know, if you had a choice of dominating the ocean or dominating the space above it, which would have greater military value?
Well, you know, I guess it depends, you know, if you're trying to do something very local or if you're trying to win a war.
But if you're trying to win a war...
Space is a pretty good place to own.
However, I don't know that space makes any difference.
Does it make any difference at all if you own space if you're going up against nuclear powers?
I would think that once you have nuclear weapons, Everything else you do is a little irrelevant if you're trying to defend against another nuclear power.
But I don't know. I'm open to an argument on this, the high ground, yeah.
I'm open to an argument that a space force is a good idea or a bad idea.
I haven't really heard the thinking on that.
Oil, gas, mining.
Yeah, you know, in the long term...
It is of course necessary, and I say the long term of humanity, it is of course necessary to tap the resources of space, if only because the economics of it is impossible now but will soon be good.
So I don't have a real opinion on that.
I didn't think the Space Force idea was much of a distraction.
Some people said, well, is it a coincidence that President Trump announces the Space Force thing at the same time he's trying to distract from the immigration thing?
And I think that doesn't really sound like his normal play.
It is normal that he would try to distract from a bad topic to a good topic, but the Space Force just isn't that.
I don't know. It just doesn't capture the imagination the way the immigration thing is.
It's not really a good counter to the topic on the table.
So I doubt he did it with the intention that this will take all the attention away from the border because it wouldn't.
He tweeted about immigration this morning.
Yeah. All right.
I'm just looking at your comments.
I don't have much else to say, so I think I'm going to sign off.
Is there any other topic today?
It seems like the topic has just come down to the border and, you know, are you in favor of more child trafficking or more children in cages crying?
Space immigration.
How did I like Michael Malice?
It was great. We had a great conversation.
You should listen to the Michael Malice conversation.
Just Google Michael Malice and my name and it'll pop up.
I hope you like it.
Alright, that's all I got.
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