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July 1, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:04
Episode 125 - The Protest That Was More of a Costume Party
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Hey everybody, join me.
It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
Simultaneous sip.
Get ready.
This doesn't happen by itself, because if they did, we wouldn't be calling it the simultaneous sip.
Here we are. Simultaneous set.
Oh, that's good.
So, we got some stuff to talk about this morning.
Boy, do we.
Let's talk about all the protests.
Now, I'm no expert on protests.
But I'll give you a few observations.
Now, I don't know if anybody is an expert at protests, but I would think there are a few things you have to get right in order to be a proper protest.
Number one, the thing you're protesting should be something that you don't already have.
Am I wrong about that?
In other words, If I were to protest against not being an old cartoonist, well, no, that's a bad example.
Let's put it this way.
If the thing you're asking for has already been granted to you, in other words, if you'd like to get children and families kept together, And your government has already agreed to do that, has literally signed an order to do that, and is literally working as hard as they can, I assume, to get it done, but it's the sort of thing that doesn't happen immediately anyway.
What exactly are you protesting?
So that's my first suggestion.
Don't hold a national protest.
For something you already have.
Secondly, if your protest looks more like a, you know, multi-user dress-up game, what's the name for that?
What's the name for the, where you play, you know, it's like Dungeons and Dragons?
Cosplay, right?
Cosplay. If your protest looks exactly like cosplay, you might be doing it wrong.
I saw people on both sides who would apparently put a lot of effort into their costumes and their signs.
Now, it looks a lot more like a lifestyle decision than a protest.
I think people were enjoying this just a little bit too much.
A little bit too much.
I think it was people on the right who had Viking outfits and shields.
I saw Antifa with their little black masks and their clubs.
I saw Proud Boys with their beards and their muscles.
I don't think I saw any pink pussy hats.
But I'm sure there was a dress style associated with a certain group of people.
So, if your protest looks like cosplay, you're probably not gonna be taken too seriously.
Now, the other thing is, you should probably pick something to protest that doesn't make you look like a giant hypocrite.
That's probably a minimum.
So in other words, if a group of murderers had a protest against murder, you might say to yourself, wait a minute, you guys are murderers.
Why are you protesting against murder?
Terrible example.
But here we have people who were allegedly protesting the treatment of children in the detention centers being separated from parents.
Where else do we have a problem of that similar scope, maybe a larger scope, where else do we have a similar problem where children are in bad situations?
People are saying prison, partial credit, abortion is the clever answer, but that's not what I was going for, foster care, Yeah, no, it's easier than that.
Divorce. Yeah, it's much easier than that.
Do you know where there are children in worse shape than the kids in the cages?
Pretty much everywhere.
Yeah, all over the planet.
Probably hundreds of millions.
Where's all the outrage for the hundreds of millions of kids who are starving, abused, separated from a parent, alcoholic parent?
Yeah, school.
People are saying school.
Yes, where else can you find children who are very upset about whatever their situation is, and they are crying like they are in terrible distress?
Where else can you find that?
Besides in these cages at the border, and by the way, I'm not in favor of kids in cages, Just want to make that clear, because I know a lot of people like to jump in and say, wait a minute, he has gone, he has talked for 30 seconds, and he did not say he is against children in cages.
It makes us think he's for it.
Here's another little example.
Yeah. So if the people marching and protesting to help the children continue marching and protesting to help all of the other children when this is over, I would say to myself, there are some people who care.
So if you have been protesting for the benefit of children before this issue, and if you continue protesting after, I'm going to say, that's a nice person.
That is someone fighting for children everywhere.
If the only time you protested for the benefit of children was the time you dressed up and went out on a nice summer day with your friends, you're not exactly a credible player.
But I'm sure it felt good.
So, I have to say, has this happened to any of you?
The whole children in cages thing, my first impression, probably similar to almost everybody else's, which is, ah, we've got to do something This is not the way our country should be.
Get those kids out of cages, etc.
Now, I know a lot of people were saying, well, it's the best we can do.
The alternatives are worse, which they are.
If you don't separate them, then you're putting adults who may not be their parents with kids.
There may be worse issues.
So some of you are rationalizing in a way, but I think on a visceral level, most of you said, well, I don't like this.
Because nobody wants their parents and kids separated if there's a way to avoid it.
So that was my first impression.
But the impact of these protests, to me, sort of worked the opposite of what I think they intended.
I think the protests, in a weird way, trivialized it.
Am I wrong about that?
Does it seem to you that the protests trivialized it?
Because it seems to me the protests were about the protesters.
Yeah, I know they had signs about the children.
And I also believe that they care about the children.
The other people who care about the children are all of the people.
That's who else.
People with signs care about the children.
And also...
All of the people who did not have signs.
There's nobody in this conversation who doesn't care about the kids.
There's nobody in the conversation that doesn't want to help them.
So when you have a national protest about something that has already been given to you, and serious people are trying to do what they can within the constraint of their resources to fix that situation, You're not serious anymore.
And I can't take you seriously anymore.
This was the most trivial protest about a real issue.
See, I'm getting more clever now because so easily I could be taken out of context there.
The issue is real.
The protest, I think, trivialized it.
Because the protest was about the protesters.
The protesters might as well have gone out in the streets and said, I hate Trump.
And this kid thing is kind of a convenient issue to rally around.
Basically using the kids as their political pawns.
Who else is using the kids as their political pawns?
The people with the signs are using kids as political pawns.
Who else is using the kids as political pawns?
Answer? All the other people, including me right now.
Everybody's doing it. There's no one side who's using the kids as political pawns.
If you're talking about them, and you're making a political point, You're using the kids as your political pawns, just like I am right now.
So let's not pretend one side is doing that.
That's now the universal context here.
In other news, some of you may know Michael Ian Black, either from his many acting in other roles, Or from, you know, movies, etc. Or you may know him from the internet, where he is one of the more vocal anti-Trumpers.
He tweeted today, and let me read the actual tweet and my response to it.
And we will do that in real time while you're waiting.
Talk among yourselves.
Have a simultaneous sip.
Didn't give any warning there.
Sorry. How the...
I hate it when my phone doesn't work.
All right.
So Michael Lee and Black tweeted today, have never felt continual daily dread about my country before.
I wake up with it, go to sleep with it.
It's exhausting. So he's describing something that, in my opinion...
In my medical opinion, is a genuine problem.
Now, I'm watching your comments and I want to warn you away from this point of view.
If you think that what he's describing is something just about this one person, you're not paying attention.
He's describing a very common feeling, and I've talked to a few other people recently who have described actual physical mental symptoms that are quite extreme, from actually throwing up to, you know, terrible stress, etc.
And I think there was a time when I and pretty much all of you were a little bit entertained by it.
It was a little bit of fun that your side won and the other side didn't win, and they were so sure they were going to win, and that made it extra fun because they were so cocky.
But at this point, it has actually metastasized into something that's a legitimate, like actually your health is in danger, kind of a problem.
And here's the next point.
There are so many people experiencing it that it would be ridiculous to say there's something wrong with the people.
In other words, there's nothing organically wrong with them.
They're not extra dumb.
They're not extra gullible, you know, more than the average person.
There's nothing individually that's wrong with them.
They're experiencing something closer to PTSD, right?
If a soldier gets PTSD, you don't say, well, there was something wrong with that one soldier, although they used to back in the old days.
It would be more fair to say lots of people get PTSD. The problem is whatever is causing the PTSD. It's not some defect in the person who got it.
The person who got it was just the victim.
They're normal. It was the force that caused it that's the problem.
Likewise, there is a situation in the country that is causing PTSD. I don't know how many people, a quarter of the country, maybe more, to have something like a mental health problem.
And if you have a mental health problem that's this stressful PTSD-wise, that absolutely is going to affect your overall health.
So I've sort of turned a corner here on how I feel about the people who are in this distress.
And I only feel sorry for them now.
It doesn't seem funny anymore.
It sort of went from, this is hilarious.
You know, you saw the pictures of the Trump supporters screaming at the sky.
Okay, I still laugh at that picture of the woman yelling at the sky with the pink hat on.
But that was also just right after the election.
And it didn't look like it was permanent.
If you saw somebody getting permanent brain damage, you wouldn't laugh at that.
But if you see somebody who's just temporarily upset about something that you don't think is important and you think it's going to wear off in a few weeks, well, you might laugh at that.
But it's starting to look kind of permanent.
Not starting to.
It's looking like a long-term problem.
So here's what I tweeted back yesterday.
To Michael Ian Black when he mentioned his distress over the country.
I said, kidding aside, this is my retweet of his tweet.
I said, kidding aside, this is a legitimate national health issue.
And then I mentioned Michael Ian Black and I said, if you want your discomfort reduced by half, I can probably do that for you with one FaceTime call.
You'll hear things that half the country has never heard.
Serious offer. Now, I don't know that he would respond to that.
I don't know if he would take it seriously.
But it's a serious offer.
And I think something good could come of it, because if I could make him feel a little less anxious, PTSD, stressed, without changing his understanding of the facts, because I don't know that I would have to change his understanding of what he's seeing, just how he's processing it, and a different sense of what the risks are involved.
But I'm pretty sure I could reduce his stress by half and that I could do it fairly quickly in the length of a phone call or a FaceTime connection.
And it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could.
Now, one thing I worry about is that anybody who sees this sort of an offer might think there's a trick to it.
Maybe the trick is that they think their feelings are completely well-matched to the reality, and that if I make them care less about it, the only thing to change was their caring, but the problem is still there.
So maybe somebody would say, no, I want to feel the way I feel because that matches the size of the problem.
So I would not expect someone to take me up on that offer.
But I can tell you from a number of conversations that I have left people in a completely different understanding about their situation than when they started.
So I'm pretty sure that I could accomplish what I offered.
Somebody says, I sat silent while Obama destroyed our country.
Well, the biggest point I think anybody needs to understand here is that the party that's out of power is the crazy one.
You've seen me go back and forth across the party lines and the political lines enough to know that I bring with me a little bit of objectivity.
I don't think any human can be objective about politics, but I probably get closer to most people just because you see me on both sides of the line often enough that you know that's true.
My observation was that when Obama was president, the Fox News version of the world looked a little crazy.
And now that Trump is in charge, the CNN version of the world looks a little crazy.
And there's a good reason for that.
The reason is that when you're in charge, you can do actual real things that probably help, because mostly the country moves forward.
It's very rare that the country is moving backwards.
Most things are improving a little bit as you go forward.
So the person in power is going to have some real accomplishments or things that look like accomplishments.
You saw Obama take over an economy that was on the brink of complete meltdown.
When he left, it wasn't super strong, but it was solid.
So Obama had things to claim.
You could argue about whether they were real accomplishments or not, but they were real things.
Meanwhile, what did the opposition have to complain about?
Mostly imaginary stuff.
We imagine that he hates the country.
I don't think that's the case.
We imagine that he's a secret Muslim sleeper cell.
Probably not. We imagine he wasn't really born in this country so that we can maintain our fantasy that he will be removed from office by a technicality.
Sound familiar?
Russian collusion investigation?
A fantasy that there could be a technicality that would remove this president?
It's all the same. It's just you're on the other side of it now.
And it's invisible to you once you change sides.
You just think, oh, I guess somebody good finally won an election.
And now all that bad stuff I don't have to think about some more.
Alright, so the main thing you have to understand is that the party out of power is the crazy one.
Most of you are on the pro-Trump side.
That's why you're watching this Periscope.
And so at the moment, you are actually not the crazy ones.
Congratulations. But I promise you that if somebody like Octavio Cortez becomes president in seven years or whenever she's old enough, you are gonna be batshit crazy.
I'm not predicting that.
I'm not predicting that she'll be president.
I'm just saying that if it happened, if Bernie became president, if somebody super left became president, you would lose your shit.
And I'm talking about Michael Allen Black style mental anguish.
You would be in a bad, bad way and the PTSD would just be reversed.
So Have a little sympathy for the side out of power.
It could do you some good.
And it might protect you when you, you know, if you should become out of power someday, or at least your political side.
It might give you a little bit of protection from the PTSD. Now, let's talk about how my day has gone for the last few days, because it's all about me.
I had a realization a few weeks ago that if you were to take all of the things anybody has ever complained about me, either on the internet or by email or even in my personal life,
all of the things that people have criticized me for or complained about, I believe, and I don't think this is an exaggeration at all, I think this is actually pretty close, that 98%, or some big number like that, I'm going to say 98% of the things that people are angry at me about are imaginary.
Yeah, there are opinions I don't have.
If you want to see a good example of this, there's somebody on the internet in the last two or three days who asked me if I was a socialist because I said something about the persuasion skills of Octavia Cortez?
I'll never be able to say her full name.
OAC? Or whatever it is.
Yeah. And so somebody said, are you a socialist?
Because you say that Ocasio Cortez.
Since I said that Ocasio Cortez had good persuasion skills, does that mean I'm a socialist?
Now, Mike Cernovich made the observation first, and I was just tagged onto his tweet and agreed with it.
And his observation was that she has persuasion skills that could be, it's early, but could be on a par with Trump.
Now, that's just talking about persuasion skills, but somebody said, are you supporting this socialist?
That means you're a socialist, right?
And Now, I decided not to answer that question the first time it was asked because it was just a stupid question.
And I only answer maybe half of the questions that people ask me on Twitter because there are so many of them.
If it's a good question or something I think really needs to be clarified, I'll answer it.
If it's a dumb question, such as, am I a socialist because I like the persuasion skills of a candidate, which are just two completely different things, I might ignore it, which I did.
What did that cause?
It caused people to pour in and say, I knew there was something wrong with that guy, that secret socialist.
My God! You know, we found him.
And then other people came in and said, I knew it all along.
This whole thing is about selling books and he's just a secret socialist.
That's right. People called me a socialist while simultaneously criticizing me for being a capitalist.
This happened.
I'm not making that up.
People were criticizing me for being a socialist who is a capitalist selling a book.
Now, I don't know who's the biggest capitalist in the world, but it might be me.
So if you ask me if I'm a ghost or an Elbonian or a communist or a socialist or an outer space alien, there's a good chance I'm not gonna give you a serious and direct answer to your question.
But, and this is important for those of you who are confused by it, just because I don't answer the question, Scott, are you a space alien?
That is not proof that I'm a space alien.
There are some questions that just don't deserve an answer, because I would hope it would be obvious.
But that was not the case.
All right. So for those people, poor people on Twitter who are confused, I am not a socialist.
That said, it is a fact that we live in a country that is part socialist because they take my taxes and they distribute it to other people for social goods.
It is also true, as I've said many times, that I think we cannot call our country great unless we have quality healthcare for everybody at some affordable cost.
Did I disavow David Duke?
Yes, I disavow David Duke.
That's the way you do it, by the way.
That's one of those that...
The David Duke one, you do have to answer.
Are you a space alien or are you a ghost?
Or are you a socialist?
You can ignore those.
But if somebody asks you if you support the KKK, the only right answer is, no, I don't.
I disavow them. If we've learned nothing.
All right. Everybody has health care and not everyone has insurance.
Big difference. Well, there is a big difference, but in a practical sense, there are people who have to go to the emergency room to get their health care, and that's not an ideal situation for anybody.
Blackhawk neighbor five houses away.
I wonder if I know you.
So my take on healthcare is that we can't get there by taxation.
We might be able to get there by using technology and being smarter about what regulations and what laws we have so that we could do healthcare in an expensive way.
Imagine if you will, Have you seen the doctors who charge a monthly fee without insurance getting in the middle?
So they'd be, for example, a small doctor's office that can do everything except what a hospital can do, or what a hospital is for.
And those doctors will charge like a low monthly fee because there's no insurance in the middle.
So they might charge you $150 a month or something.
And you can use their services as much as you want.
Now, if you add that to, for example, a catastrophic healthcare insurance, you probably have something pretty close to affordable.
But not many people have access to that kind of a clinic.
Yeah, then you've got Jeff Bezos doing his pharmacy idea.
I would expect, you know, I would expect that we could lower healthcare costs By something like, I think what is achievable is a 75% reduction.
With the exception of the end of life stuff, which is unfortunately the expensive part.
Still have the problem of pre-existing conditions.
Yeah, you might need some special kind of insurance for catastrophic and for pre-existing.
Maybe there's some ways that those two things, the things that people can't afford and can't help themselves, there might be some insurance for that that makes sense.
Let old people die already.
Well, you know, unfortunately, I think there might be a time when people are choosing to go out on their own terms, and society may find that that's okay.
Think about this.
In our current world, if I said to you, hey, how would it be if old people Who probably will live a long time, but they don't like the quality of their life.
They've got some medical problems, whatever.
If I said, hey, how about we have a society that lets those people take their own life in some painless way?
Most people would say no.
Most people would say no.
You can't have people killing themselves, even with a doctor's help, just because they're not happy about how their old age is going.
A lot of people would say yes, but the majority would say no.
But now imagine this.
Imagine we go from a place where we can keep you alive an extra year.
Let's say that's our current situation.
We can keep you alive a year longer than maybe nature would have done it.
What happens when we can keep you alive for 50 years?
Right? What if I can keep you alive, but the quality of your life sucks, but you're going to be alive for 50 more years?
Let's say you're 60, but science gets to the point where, well, you won't be able to walk around and you won't be able to eat solid food, but your brain will be alive.
You know, people can visit you.
You'll be mostly bedridden and it'll last 50 years.
What does society do then?
Well, that's the point at which a voluntary check out, if I could put it that way, that's the point when society says, yeah, how about we just look the other way, and if you want to take a trip to that state that allows that, we're not going to judge you.
So I think as science improves its ability to keep people alive but unhappy, this is the trick.
The longer that period is, the science can keep you alive and unhappy.
It's going to get longer and longer until society will just say, well, let's get a little flexible about when people check out.
Let's talk about abortion.
Changing the subject, all these life and death situations.
Before talking about abortion, it's always useful to state the opinion of the person who's talking.
My opinion on abortion is that I, as a male, I take myself out of the conversation and I'm willing to follow the lead of women.
So if women collectively want it legal, illegal, whatever they want, I'm going to follow the lead.
Because I have nothing to add to the conversation.
I'm not abdicating my vote.
And if my money is involved, of course I want an opinion.
If your money is involved, of course you want an opinion too.
So I'm not saying you change the law.
I'm just saying that I personally take myself out of the conversation because I don't add anything.
So whatever women collectively want is going to be where I'm likely to support.
Alright, having said that, that's not my point.
Here's my point. Would you be comfortable with your federal government ever deciding that killing citizens is a good deal?
In other words, there are a lot of gray areas, right?
There's doctor-assisted suicide.
There's war.
There's the death penalty.
There's abortion.
Depending on your definitions of things, people will put them in different categories.
But there are a number of life and death types of decisions that governments get involved with.
I have a political philosophy that I want to share with you.
And that is that the federal government, as opposed to the state governments, so what I'm going to say does not apply to the states.
Only the federal government.
I think the federal government should always err on the side of life.
Because, and this has nothing to do with abortion per se or any of those issues per se, the states are closer to the people and it just makes more sense for them to deal with the life or death situations.
It also gives somebody the option of moving to another state if they feel that strongly about it.
But I think I want my federal government in every gray area to be biased toward life, no matter what they personally believe about abortion or capital punishment or anything else.
Let the states work that stuff out.
It just feels like the right place to do it.
I just don't want the entity that controls the military You know, the federal government.
I don't want the entity that controls the federal government to ever take a gray area position against what may or may not be life.
Just period. Doesn't matter what the topic is.
We might have new topics someday that fit into this, you know, technology might create a situation where there are new topics of life and death.
And in those topics, I want our federal government to err on the side of whatever keeps its citizens alive.
Now, That might mean just taking themselves out of the conversation.
So if the states are making decisions that are different one state to the other, at least in the marketplace of ideas and freedom and all that, people have some option.
Not an easy option, but at least you have an option to move to another state if it mattered.
All right. Somebody says it's exactly the same with pot.
I don't know if it is, because pot isn't really a life and death situation.
I'm talking specifically about gray areas of life and death.
For example, if somebody's in a coma, should the federal government have any say about whether you pull the plug?
I say, no.
The federal government should have no say.
Now, whether or not the state government has some say in that, I think probably it should be between the doctor and the parents and the patient, but certainly the state would be in the more appropriate place to have any say, and the federal government should just stay the heck out of it.
You don't want to live in a country You don't want to live in a country where the federal government, the one that controls the army, can ever, ever, ever, on any topic, in any gray area, say, you know, let's kill a few citizens because I think that'll be okay.
Same with the death penalty.
Death penalty, leave it up to the states.
Same thing. You don't want your federal government killing citizens or To have the appearance of killing citizens.
That's what abortion is, right?
So, you know, half the country says, that is killing, you know, that's killing people.
And half the country says, no, it's a medical procedure.
But they would acknowledge that a lot of people see it as killing, and in that situation, get the federal government out of it.
You don't want to live in that country where the federal government could ever decide, well, it's okay, these aren't really people.
Because you don't want them to decide that about anything else.
You don't want to start that trend.
All right.
What else have we not talked about today?
I'm just looking at your comments right now.
The heat wave.
Michael Moore.
Well, I think Michael Moore is a good example of the Michael Allen Black, Michael Ian Black situation that I think You know, I think Moore is sincere, and I think that his distress is probably real.
Yeah, I think Michael Moore's distress, like, you know, maybe a quarter of the country, is legitimately a medical mental problem.
Am I getting up to speed on Cloward and Piven?
I don't know who they are.
Somebody said, Stormy who?
Stormy who, indeed.
Let's talk about Rosenstein.
Rosenstein? Rosenstein.
Rosenstein, I think. And Alan Dershowitz's take on it is that since Rosenstein wrote the memo that fired Comey, and the firing of Comey somehow was the thing that kicked off the whole Russia investigation situation, that would make Rosenstein part of the case, and therefore he can't be in charge of the case in which he's a potential witness on the case.
And I thought to myself, as soon as Dershowitz explains it, It looks obvious.
Steen, not Stein, somebody says.
It's Rosenstein. As soon as Dershowitz says, yeah, you can't be in charge of something in which you're also a potential witness, and of course he's a potential witness because he was right in the middle of the whole situation.
And I thought to myself, that seems so obvious after he points it out.
That I think to myself, how can this situation stand?
How in the world can he not recuse himself?
But apparently he's got his reasons.
Now, I have nothing, by the way, I have nothing against Rosenstein.
Rosenstein? Rosenstein.
I have nothing against him.
I don't know enough about what he is or is not doing.
And I think we should all be cautious about making judgments about him because we don't know what he knows that we don't know.
We don't know what Mueller knows that we don't know.
An opinion on his mannerisms.
Well, I only saw some clips of him debating people at the congressional hearings, and he was quite competitive, not in a way that bothered me.
Somebody said Strzok failed the polygraph.
You know that doesn't mean anything, right?
The polygraph is not real science.
There's a reason that it's not allowed in court.
It's not allowed in court because it's not reliable.
A polygraph is still useful even though it doesn't tell you the truth.
It's useful when the person who takes it believes it works.
So, for example, if you were a criminal and you thought the polygraph was accurate and you took it and you failed, Then the polygraph administrator says, you know, well, you failed the polygraph.
Is there anything you'd like to confess?
And I imagine in quite a few situations, the person confesses either all of or part of something he hadn't said before, just to sort of deal with the fact that he failed the polygraph.
So the polygraph is a useful tool that's built on bullshit.
The only way Rosenstein can stay on is if Mueller is not investigating obstruction of justice.
And at this point, it's probably fair to say that the investigation has, you know, its tentacles have branched off, and he is talking about more than just obstruction of justice.
Um... Yeah.
Alright, so I think I've said everything I need to say for today.
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