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June 30, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:24
Episode 124 - Children in Cages (I.e. Democrats), New Master Persuader, socialism, NK and More
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Hey everybody. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Sing along everybody.
Raise your mug.
And let's have a simultaneous sip to the best morning all day long.
Mmm.
Alright.
We got lots to talk about.
Number one, in no particular order, there's a report that NBC is reporting that several sources in the intelligence community, several of them, have reported that North Korea is cheating by, I don't know, enriching uranium or something.
Now, the interesting part of that story is I've never seen a story that had so little credibility, which doesn't mean it's not true.
I have no idea if it's true or not true.
It could easily be true.
But when you hear that several intelligent sources told NBC something, What have you learned?
Nothing. That's like saying nothing.
Now what are the odds?
That NBC or some intelligence people, plus NBC, what are the odds that so many people would be leaking from intelligence sources, first of all?
And second of all, what are the chances that NBC would try to risk a nuclear war In order to improve the chances of Democrats in the midterms.
Would NBC risk nuclear annihilation just to get a little advantage in the midterms?
I think so.
Yeah, I think they would.
All the evidence suggests that they absolutely would do that.
Now, of course, they would rationalize it by saying, well, we're maybe preventing a bigger problem by letting this President Trump have his way.
So, yeah, they would.
So, we live in a world where when NBC says multiple anonymous intelligence agencies have told us X, you could just ignore it.
It might be true.
It might be.
But there's no credibility there whatsoever.
You could just ignore it.
Now, if it turns out that it's true, meaning that other sources report it, or let's say the administration acknowledges it, or John Bolton goes on some show and says, yeah, we're seeing some stuff we don't like, well, then I'd say chances are pretty good that there's something going on we need to know more about.
But if all it is is NBC, And anonymous sources.
Alright, let's talk about the trouble I got in yesterday.
So, Mike Cernovich noted first that Octavia Cortez seems to have the skills of a master persuader, persuasion-wise.
Not talking about her politics.
I'm not endorsing her.
I'm not supporting her.
But I agree with the observation that her game is very high.
Now, it might be luck that she won this first one, but when was the last time you, you know, who's the last politician you heard being called lucky?
Trump. The reason that you call somebody lucky when they've won something that is hard to win is because you don't understand how they did it.
And people, I think, don't understand how she got so far, and so you default to, well, maybe lucky, maybe it's her gender, plus her ethnicity, plus low turnout, yeah.
And what's the other, what do I tell you when people have lots of reasons for a thing?
If you have lots of different reasons to explain something, probably cognitive dissonance.
Not always. I mean, it could be there are just lots of things.
But when you see lots of different explanations for why something unusual happened, it probably means nobody knows.
And one of the ways that nobody would know is if it's because it's skill.
Because people don't recognize Persuasion skill.
Allow me to make the case that she has skill.
I'm not a socialist.
I'm not recommending her policies.
People on Twitter said, my God, you said she has skill.
You must be a socialist.
No, those things are not in any way connected.
You can have skill and not be a socialist.
It's possible. So the skill and the socialist part are separate questions.
You can hate her for a socialist part.
Let's just talk about the skill.
Now, there are two things that she said that are pretty extreme.
One is to eliminate ICE. Now, when you hear that, don't you say to yourself, you can't eliminate ICE. I mean, you could change the name or you could...
You know, merge it with another department.
But the function, of course, is going to remain because there has to be some enforcement of the border.
Now, she has apparently admitted that she sometimes takes extreme positions as an anchor because that gives her lots of room to negotiate to what she really wants.
Which is that our immigration enforcement is friendlier in whatever way she would like to see it friendlier.
More family friendly, for example, would be one part of that.
So when you see somebody with her talent saying something insanely too much, where have you seen that before?
Does that remind you in any way of another candidate who once ran for president saying he would deport 14 million undocumented folks from the United States who were otherwise working and minding their business.
When you heard that, didn't you say, well, that's not even possible.
I mean, that was civil war.
But now that he's doing things which are extreme by historical standards, But not nearly as extreme as deporting 14 million people.
He sounds close to reasonable because he started with such a big anchor.
So Octavio Cortez has explicitly told us in an interview that she does the same thing.
She's making a big first ask to see how much room that gives her to negotiate to something more reasonable.
What was everybody talking about for the past several days since she won her nomination?
Everybody was talking about her.
Everybody was talking about eliminating ICE. She controlled the conversation from her small, small position in the world.
I mean, she's a rank beginner, literally not even elected.
And she's already controlling the conversation.
You can think that's a coincidence.
You can think that's lucky.
At your peril.
At your peril.
Because that doesn't look like luck to me.
That is so on form for perfect persuasion that if it's lucky, well, it's pretty lucky.
Now let's take another example.
She has labeled herself some kind of a socialist.
And she has said, among other things, she said that she'd like to see universal health care.
Now the world blows up and they say, my God, she's actually an out-of-the-closet socialist.
We can't go that far.
Socialism never works.
Guess what? Oh, I hate that phrase.
Did you know that she has a degree in economics?
Put this together.
She has a degree in economics, which means she understands economics.
At least the big picture.
At the same time, she's supporting socialism, which 100% of economists, or something like that, would say doesn't work.
How do you explain that she's got a degree in economics and she's taking an economic position that couldn't possibly work?
Full socialism. How do you explain it?
She's a master persuader because full socialism isn't what she really wants.
She doesn't want that because she understands it can't work.
She's creating space.
You're calling it lying.
Guess what everybody calls President Trump when he uses hyperbole?
Guess what they call President Trump when he takes an extreme position and then backs off it to something he still wants, but it's less in the extreme.
Her technique is right on point.
She's on point, totally on point.
She's made extreme claims.
She has completely dominated the conversation.
She's sucked all of the energy out of the political thought on her.
And she also had that great campaign commercial that was very visual, very emotional, hit every note.
Coincidence? Is it a coincidence?
It could be.
It's still a little early to rule out she got lucky, but the odds of this being luck are very, very low.
And let me say again as clearly as I can, I'm not backing her politics, but neither is she.
She's negotiating with the country.
She's taking our attention.
She's got our focus.
She's controlling the conversation.
Don't underestimate her.
And, and, what is she, 28?
Or whatever, yeah, I think she's 28.
Imagine this level of political skill at 28.
Okay, so that's enough about that.
I'm not supporting her, not supporting socialism, I'm just supporting her, I'm just commenting on her skill level.
Let's talk about children in cages.
You know what children in cages I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the poor Democrats whose policies are childlike and they can't get out of that little cage.
So the Democrats like to have policies that are opposing the president that are not complete policies.
Meaning that they're feverishly, fervently pushing policies that would only make sense to a child because it's either all the costs or all the benefits, but it's only looking at half of the situation.
Let me give you an example. When I was a little kid, I don't know if I was five or how old I was, I insisted that my father build me an airplane.
Now, I didn't want something to look like an airplane.
I wanted him to build me an airplane out of wood because he had some carpentry skills.
So I thought, well, how hard could it be to build an airplane?
So I bugged my father until he built...
Some kind of a little toy airplane that I could sit in that didn't actually fly.
But it was the best I could do.
Best he could do, best anybody could do with carpentry.
And that was sort of my childlike view is, I don't see why an airplane can't be built out of wood by my father.
How hard could it be?
A child's view.
Likewise, when you say stuff like, hey, let's just sign a piece of paper and then all the children will be kept together, that's sort of like building an airplane and a wood that you happen to have sitting in your backyard.
I lived in the country.
We had wood in our backyard.
Don't judge me. Because here's the thing.
Separating kids and parents was done primarily to keep the children safe.
So if you're asking to put them back together, are you questioning that they'll be safer apart?
Because I didn't hear anybody say that.
Or are you saying that you accept the fact that some of those kids will be raped and killed because they're being put back with people who are not necessarily their parents, if you're going to do it quickly?
Or are you imagining that the facilities to put families and kids together suddenly quadruple because somebody signed a piece of paper?
Only children can think this way.
Things don't happen quickly.
And the problem that President Trump found himself in is that the number of people coming across with kids skyrocketed because they learned that it was a loophole and it could get them some advantage.
So you can't compare what Trump's doing to what Obama did because the scale of the problem magnified so much.
When a small problem becomes a big problem, it's kind of a different problem because the way you deal with it has to be different.
So the children in cages, metaphorically, are the Democrats who can't get out of this little box of thinking that things have easy answers and that you don't need to consider the costs.
War? Get rid of the army.
You can end war just by, let's just get rid of our military.
So that would be a childlike response to ending war.
How about...
Healthcare. Here's the childlike approach to healthcare.
Universal healthcare. Done.
Sign a piece of paper.
Build me an airplane and a wood you found in the backyard.
How hard could it be?
I can say it in words.
But if you were to give everybody universal healthcare, What would that look like in terms of budgets and taxes and the economy and everything else?
And by the way, I've been saying for a long time, I'm in favor of universal healthcare in the sense of universal access.
But I think we get there by changing how it's delivered and bringing down the cost so that at a very low cost you could get most of what you need.
You still need some insurance for the catastrophic stuff probably.
Look at almost any other issue at the Democrats.
Let's take income inequality.
Let's fix our income inequality, says the child in a cage.
How? How do you do that without driving out all the capitalists?
Do you just take their money and transfer it to somebody?
What does that do to incentives and to the economy?
Yeah, I'm not going to touch that one.
But you can go down the list and you'll find that there's an adult policy which has costs and benefits.
So President Trump is pushing what I would call an adult concept for immigration.
An adult concept looks like this.
There's something we want to accomplish, which is protecting the country.
It's going to have a big cost.
It ain't free.
But if you compare what it costs to our benefits, the benefits are bigger.
That feels like an adult conversation.
Even if you decide that you rank the variables differently, you're at least having an adult conversation.
Somebody said you sidestepped income inequality.
Why did I sidestep it? I just mentioned that it's impractical to simply transfer money to people.
How crazy are things going to get with a Supreme Court nominee next week?
Well, some of it depends on the nominee.
Here's a...
Yeah, I think we have to wait and see who the nominee is before we know how bad things are going to get.
They use Roe vs.
Wade. Yeah, the Roe vs.
Wade argument is also a childlike Because there's a little complexity here that's being ignored, which is even if the Supreme Court said, well, we're out of the business, it would get caked to the states.
The states would have to deal with the severe economic repercussions of changing their abortion laws.
So it's not as simple as added justice and Roe vs.
Wade gets overturned. I'm not seeing that happening.
Talk about the judge list.
I'm not familiar with the judges on the list.
Did you see Moore?
Michael Moore? No, I did not.
I did see Michael Moore saying that he's crying about the children in the cages because he is a child in a cage, metaphorically.
Blame the illegal alien parents.
That, too, is a childlike view.
So let me say that the childlike view is not limited to Democrats, because I just saw one go by that's what I would consider a childlike view.
And that is that we should blame the parents for bringing these children who ended up separated from them.
That's how children think.
Specifically, children say that the problem and the solution have to be the same.
The problem is that these adults are bringing children.
Everybody agrees that's the problem.
But that doesn't mean that those same adults are the solution.
What does it mean to say, well, it's their fault, I'm done?
You know, the world isn't that simple.
It's our frickin' problem, too.
So just because they caused the problem doesn't absolve us from doing what we can do to lessen the impact of that problem.
So if you're saying, blame it on the adults, done.
That is a childlike view that ignores the complexity of the situation.
What about the solo children?
I don't know exactly how important that comment was.
Shapiro on Mar, has he been there?
Are you saying that he was there last night?
I didn't watch it last night. We could boot them back and immediately make it their problem.
We could boot them back if we, again, another childlike view, we can boot them back if we would like to be in violation of international norms about amnesty.
Because it turns out that some percentage of these people coming across have genuine amnesty requirements and just kick them back ignores that.
Now, if you're saying, let's just kick them back and let's get out of the amnesty business for everybody all the time, I would say that's an adult view which you can agree with or disagree with.
But if you just ignore the amnesty issue and just say, eh, just don't let them in.
It doesn't matter if they have amnesty.
You're not really part of the conversation.
You're a child in a cage.
If you can't see the whole picture...
You're a child in a cage.
You're asking your parents to build you an airplane out of wood that's sitting in the backyard.
Less than 20% have an amnesty case, but you gotta find out once they get here.
Thoughts on the guy running for Mexico?
Well, apparently the guy running for Mexico, who is likely to win, is talking about overwhelming our borders with folks.
And it could be that he is also using hyperbole.
It could be he doesn't really mean that.
But I think we have to treat it like he does.
Because that's the sort of risk you don't want to not be ready for.
You have to fix the source.
Yeah, I don't know how much power we have to fix the source.
If you're going to fix the source, I think you would invade.
Let's just walk this through.
I was thinking about this the other day.
So it seems to me that the problems with the countries that are sending immigrants to the United States is that they either have cartels or MS-13 gangs that are so powerful That is causing the immigration, that people can't even live in their own countries.
If that's true, we should at least consider invading.
And when I say invading, there are a couple ways you could do that.
One would be to legalize, let's say, What would you call it?
Not bounty hunters, but what do you call soldiers who work for money?
What's the word for that?
What's the word for soldiers who work for money?
Why am I blanking on that?
Mercenaries, thank you. One of the things you could do is give a blank check to mercenaries and say, look, we'll fly you over.
We'll give you military support.
Just kill as many MS-13 and cartel members as you want.
And it's just like hunting season.
Just go nuts. Just kill as many as you want and maybe we'll pay you per kill or something like that.
Because right now the...
The governments are weaker than the criminals.
When the governments are weaker than the criminals and you don't want to invade and take over the government, drop some mercenaries in there and just have them take care of it.
Because I'm pretty sure we could drop mercenaries in there Who are far more trained and capable than the people they're hunting.
And, you know, if they get surrounded or something, maybe we could pull them out or give them air support or something.
But I'll bet you could just drop a bunch of mercenaries behind their lines and just have them hunt.
Take out as many as they want.
I'm not saying that's the best idea in the world.
I'm just saying that if anybody has a better idea, I'd like to hear it.
Because consider all the alternative ideas.
We'll just brainstorm for a moment.
This isn't a topic I've thought a lot about.
If you were to try to help the economies of those countries...
Because you think to yourself, oh, it's the bad economy, that's why they're sending people here.
You're missing the fact that a lot of them are leaving because of violence, and you're missing the fact that the gangs and the cartels will suck up any money that comes into the country.
So you really can't just help their economy, because crime is the problem that's hurting the economy, it's making the government malfunction, it's causing people to leave.
You have to go after the The source problem.
And the source problem would have to be dealt with either by, well, what are the ways you could deal with the gangs and the cartels?
You can give money to the governments, but the governments are probably owned by the cartels, at least enough that that's not going to work.
You could give money to their militaries, but the military is probably on the take, or enough of them are that it wouldn't work.
So you can't invade because we don't really want to be in the country invading business.
You can't help their government.
And you can't help their economy.
What's left? Seriously, what's left?
You can't help the economy.
You can't help their government.
There's nothing left.
You can't invade. Mercenaries.
Suppose you started dropping mercenaries to hunt their cartels.
What would the governments of those countries say?
Damn it! Stop it!
Of course, most of them would be paid off by the cartels and the gangs to say that, I suppose.
But they would complain.
So? Right?
Of all the ideas, there are a bunch of ones that just can't possibly work.
And there's one that's a terrible idea, dropping mercenaries in their country and supporting them with their military, you know, sort of on the down low.
It's a terrible idea.
You're going to get civilians killed.
It's going to be essentially an attack on an allied country.
You know, you've got all these problems.
But, but, still might be the best idea.
I'm just not ignoring that it would have a terrific cost as well as a terrific upside.
So, yeah, when I say allied countries, I mean countries like Mexico, which, you know, El Salvador, they're essentially in our sphere of, you know, sphere of the Americas they're essentially in our sphere of, you know, sphere of the Americas It doesn't mean they're in NATO. Drones.
Drones indeed.
Drones could be part of helping a group on the ground.
Now, I would imagine that you could find...
Fact check this for me.
Don't you think you could find lots of special forces types who would do this job?
I don't think there would be a manpower problem.
I feel as if we could get that done.
There would be plenty of volunteers.
And if they had, you know, nearly unlimited American military support on the down low, perhaps, I feel like they could take care of this pretty quickly.
And they could do things maybe that our military wouldn't do or couldn't do.
And it's sort of, there's some deniability there.
I think Eric Prince is out of that business, isn't he?
I thought he sold Blackwater.
Does he still own Blackwater?
Do you think MS-13 watches my periscopes?
Well, I certainly hope not.
But probably not.
So if you talk about this idea later, make sure you attribute it to Maxine Waters so nobody comes after me.
Why not use mercenaries on the border to do what?
Kill immigrants?
I don't even know. Why would you do that?
I think somebody suggested a crypto coin to an ICO to fund mercenaries.
But quite honestly, I've given you A terrible idea.
Supporting mercenaries in a neighboring country has got to make you uncomfortable, right?
Just the idea of it. But give me a better one.
It doesn't have to be a detailed idea, but can somebody suggest in the comments a better approach to getting at the source of the immigration problem?
Anybody. Anything better than mercenaries.
Sensitivity training.
Stop employers from giving illegals work.
I don't think so.
I don't think that's...
Do nothing...
Now remember, if you were to simply stop them at the border or you were to, let's say, police employers so that they didn't give work to them, you would first of all be hurting American businesses quite a bit, but you wouldn't be solving the problem, the root problem.
And I suspect that as long as the root problem is not solved, there will be enough employers who will illegally use them But I will acknowledge, by the way, I will acknowledge that cutting off employers from hiring might actually make a difference.
So let's say you did both.
Wichter thinks that's what's happening in the Middle East.
So Wichter thinks that mercenaries are working in the Middle East.
I don't know if we need mercenaries because we can operate in our full military way there.
I just don't know why we'd need them.
Legalize the drugs.
Well, the cartels still have plenty of markets and plenty of clout.
I don't know if legalizing the drugs would make much difference.
Hire illegals as mercenaries.
Hire illegals as mercenaries.
Oh God, that's so bad.
Somebody said hire the illegal immigrants as the mercenaries.
That's making a bad idea worse.
I mean, ethically it would be worse and effectiveness wise it would be worse.
Alright, so I think we've solved as much as we're going to solve today.
I'm going to go back to work.
Have I covered all of the topics?
I believe I have.
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