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Aug. 1, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
22:02
Episode 163 Scott Adams: Apologists, CNN in Cages
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- Bum bum bum, bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum.
Well, yes, I'm on very early today.
Some of you will have to wake up and get your coffee with Scott Adams on delayed replay.
Yeah, we got some early sipping going on for the early birds.
It's worth it to wake up early, because those who wake up early, sometimes, sometimes, they get coffee with Scott Adams.
And they get the simultaneous sip live, although on replay it's pretty darn good.
But here we go.
Mmm. So I'm doing a little traveling today, so I needed to get on here so that you would not wake up and say, hey, what's wrong with my day?
I don't see the simultaneous sip.
Well, here I am. So I had one topic, primarily, I wanted to talk about today.
I was watching CNN yesterday, and I noticed them, the way they're framing the children in cages story.
Now their framing, I was watching the Anderson Cooper show, is that Jeff Sessions admitted that the zero tolerance rule was for, what's the word, where you're trying to discourage crime in the future?
It's too early in the morning.
Tell me the word for discouraging crime.
What's the word for that?
So Jeff Sessions says, yes, we made the rule change of zero tolerance to discourage future crime.
Deterrence, yes, as a deterrence.
Now, because part of that resulted in children being separated from their parents and put it in cages, I say cages.
The way CNN is framing that is that the administration decided to put children in cages as a deterrence.
Now, here's the first problem.
All crime, at least all crime laws, are deterrents.
So when someone asked, hey, Jeff Session, are you doing this as a deterrent?
The answer should have been, is it a law?
Because laws are deterrents, that's what they do.
Focusing on the child part is a little bit unfair, even though that's the part we care about.
Now, somebody online referred to me as an apologist for the administration for pointing out that the decision to separate the families had to be compared to the alternative.
That's all I did. So I said, you have to compare it to the alternative.
The alternative is that the current situation was encouraging traffickers and whatnot to take kids that were not theirs, pretend the kids were theirs, and then get into the country and be let free because there weren't enough facilities to hold them together as families.
So when I describe it to people, I say, you realize You realize that there were two choices.
Either letting them stay together, which would encourage traffickers, and let traffickers get away with it, the ones that were already coming through.
So the decision was, as I understand it, that you either have some hopefully temporary pain psychologically for the kids that were separated from families, Versus giving traffickers free reign and letting kids be raped and killed.
Now, maybe 5% of them might have been in that category, maybe 10%, we don't really know, are in the category of kids that were not with real parents and were in actual mortal danger, or at least physical danger.
And so I said, well it was the adult decision was to do something that absolutely was bad for families and children coming over.
There's no doubt that that's bad and nobody defends that.
But it had to be compared to the alternative, which was children being raped.
That was the alternative.
So the adult frame on this is that you had two terrible choices.
The administration chose one, and I think it's fair to say if you wanted to argue the other side, I'm not sure you'd be wrong because you'd have to size the mental distress.
So if you said there's so much mental distress separating the families that it's worse for the children in total than for those 5 or 10 percent to be brutally victimized.
Maybe. I mean, depends how bad the psychological trauma is.
I haven't seen any data on that.
But that would be a reasonable opinion.
I could disagree with it.
I could agree with it. But at least it would be an opinion.
But here's the thing.
Why do I get called an apologist for saying there's a cost and a benefit and the administration looked at them and they think they took the one that's the better deal, given the alternatives?
And the child view is that there are no alternatives.
There's just one bad thing and you shouldn't do it.
That's how children look at things.
Why can't I have candy?
Well, it's almost time for dinner.
I want candy. But you won't have an appetite for dinner.
You need your nutrition.
I want candy. So most of the people who are against the administration are taking the I want candy side, which is just completely ignoring That there are costs and benefits for every decision.
And if you haven't talked about both of them, you're not really the adult in the conversation.
So, here's my suggestion.
For those people who say, why are you defending the administration putting kids in cages, the first response is nobody defends that.
Nobody thinks it's a good idea for kids to be in cages or separated from adults.
Nobody thinks sort of in the general sense, nobody thinks that's a good idea.
But it's the adult decision compared to the alternative.
And if you prefer the alternative to the kids in cages, and again, we're talking about the short run.
In the long run, I think everybody's happier that that situation gets resolved.
Took more resources than they had.
Took a while to ramp up.
It should have been faster.
Everybody would agree. Even the people doing it probably would agree, I wish we could do this faster.
But I would say that the people who are on the other side of the administration are, wait for it, child trafficking apologists.
Right? If you can be an apologist on one side, you can kind of be an apologist on the other side.
Because apologist is one of those words where you try to win the conversation by putting the better word on it.
You know, there are costs which you can describe, there are benefits which you can describe, and then you can see which is bigger.
But trying to label it with a word, it's like, oh, you're an apologist.
That's just trying to win with a word.
You haven't added anything.
There's no reason an apologist.
Both sides are the apologist in this case.
Somebody's an apologist for kids in cages, which is nobody, really, because there's literally zero people who want to put children in cages.
And the other side is the apologist for child trafficking, even though they're not, right?
I mean, it's just a point.
The point here Is that it's such an illegitimate way to present the news.
Completely illegitimate. And by the way, the argument I just gave you, which is that separating them is necessary to reduce the victimization of the children, you don't even see that on CNN. Like, I watched for a while, and I didn't see anybody even mention that that was the point of it.
Alright. Did somebody say...
Tommy Robinson was freed from jail.
I haven't seen that story. I haven't checked the news yet.
How many of you saw the little clip of President Trump at the rally doing his impression of acting presidential?
If you haven't seen it, It's worth watching.
He does this great impression of a president.
Now, what could be funnier than watching a president, an actual sitting president, doing a live stage impression of a sitting president?
This is funny stuff!
And he did it well.
It was actually a very funny impression.
It looked like it was off the cuff.
I don't think he'd ever practiced that before.
And I thought he nailed it.
And on the humor level, forget about the politics, just on the humor level it was really well executed.
Somebody said, so in the same program I was watching Anderson Cooper's show, it mentioned that the president's rally claims, so the facts that he claims in his rallies, that 75% of them don't pass the fact checking.
Now, they say that in the context of just presenting those children in cage things, which was totally fake news.
Now, it's fake news not because they got any facts wrong.
It's fake news because they presented it in an intentionally misleading fashion.
I call that fake news.
If it's obvious that it's being presented without key facts, in this case the alternative to putting the kids in the cages, If you don't present that, that's not real news.
That's sort of fake news.
We talked about the 3D guns.
Am I wrong to say that the 3D guns only fire one shot?
It looked like they would only be built to handle one shot, sort of like a prison zip gun or something like that.
One to three? You have to put in one bullet at a time though, right?
Who the hell is going to print a gun that's the worst gun in the world when you can just buy a gun?
I've got a feeling that everything we're worried about these plastic guns, it might be some kind of a super future thing where they can actually make a decent gun.
But at the moment, I don't see anybody...
Yeah, you're saying a hitman?
I'll bet you even a hitman would not use a plastic gun.
You know why? Because it only shoots one bullet and it might not work.
Suppose you print your plastic gun, and then you say, I better make sure this works, and then you shoot it.
Does that mean it's gonna work a second time?
I don't know, because that bullet moving through the chamber probably changed the nature of the gun, if it's plastic.
So, I don't know that a professional hitman's gonna use a plastic 3D printed gun, and if he does, there's probably a way to detect Don't you think there's a way to detect that the gun was made on a 3D printer?
And if so, it automatically limits the number of people who could have made that gun and used it.
So it feels to me that if you want to be off the radar, you don't want to have an internet record showing you downloaded the plans for a 3D gun.
I suppose you could get somebody else to do it, but you're still leaving a trail that, I don't know, no good hit man wants to leave that trail.
Print two guns, but you don't know if the second one works.
You can't really be sure.
I'm just saying that if you're a professional hitman, you don't want to use the bad gun.
It's easier to get one that's just, you know, shave off the serial number, I would think.
I'm no hitman, but I would think that's the way it works.
Alright. Plastic guns are illegal and have been.
Yeah, it's illegal, but if you can download them, people are going to have them.
Alright, that's enough on plastic guns.
I probably need to get going here pretty soon.
Got to hit the airport.
Got to trip. James Gunn.
It's funny that so many things in the news have to do with a gun.
James gun. Plastic gun.
Somebody got shot with a gun.
ISIS has guns.
All right, it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Somebody asked about Bill Pulte, and I will tell you that there are some exciting things happening there that we'll talk about very soon.
So you're going to hear about that very soon.
And think about ideas for those blighted areas that have been cleared.
That's all I'm going to say for now.
Just think about some ideas, if you have some, that might matter later.
Alright, Acosta getting shouted down.
Yeah, so we all saw, probably most of you saw the clip of Jim Acosta appearing at the Trump rally.
He was trying to do his live remote and the Trump crowd around him was chanting CNN sucks and traitor and stuff like that.
But the funny thing is, if you looked at the faces of the crowd, correct me if I'm wrong, but they looked like they were just having fun.
Did it look dangerous even a little bit?
The people chanting were like, ah, CNN sucks, CNN sucks.
I think what the left doesn't understand is the extent to which the right is in on the joke.
You know, we're tough and CNN sucks and all that.
Of course it's based on truth.
You know, people actually do feel that way, but the chanting and the stuff and the attacking the media, it's not quite as serious as people are making it out to be.
It's just not that serious.
Now, I had a thought about the midterm turnout.
I'm not sure how dominant this thought will be.
So there's a persuasion element hanging over the election, the midterm election.
Now, it won't be as big as all of the other factors, like how's the economy doing and what's the specific matchup and all that stuff.
But I haven't heard anybody talk about it.
And it goes like this.
I think this will be the first time you've ever heard this from anybody.
This next election is going to remind us deeply of 2016 and the presidential election, right?
Nobody's going to go to the election polling booths for the midterms without in their head holding this thought about the 2016 presidential election.
For Republicans, that day was one of the best days ever.
Let's say just the Trump supporters.
It was one of the best days ever.
Correct. So far correct, right?
Republicans are going to remember that day, and the midterm will remind them of that, and they'll think that was like the best time ever.
I sure would like to do that again.
I'd like to have that best day again.
Now, the people on the left, the Trump haters, of course, they're incented by their hate.
But here's the thing.
Their memory of the last election It's a bitter taste.
Forget about the logic of it, where they might say, hey, we want to go and have good turnout, and we would like to vote our people in, and then we'll get our policies.
People are not really that kind of people.
We're kind of emotional creatures that are reminded by things, and we associate things, and we feel things, and we remember things that were unpleasant, and those things really drive us to some extent.
So the people who are the anti-Trumpers who had the worst election night ever, are they going to want to repeat that?
Because it involves them going to the elections place, the polling places, voting, coming home and watching TV, and then just being crushed.
So do you do things again if you've been crushed the last time you did them?
Now, if you were logical, you'd say, well, yes you would.
If last time the votes were not in your favor, you would try twice as hard to vote this time.
You'd try to get your friends to vote.
You'd get everybody to vote.
Logically, that's exactly what you'd do.
But how do you feel?
I'll tell you how the Trump Republicans are going to feel.
They're going to feel, you know that last election day?
That was frickin' amazing.
Let's do that again.
And the people who are on the losing side of the presidential election are going to say, I didn't like it last time.
Like, I seriously didn't like it last time.
I'm not sure if I could go through with it, even knowing that my vote would count, because I just don't want to be part of the crushing defeat again.
You know, it feels the same.
It feels like the polls are telling me my side's gonna win.
But what if I go there, and I vote again, and at nine o'clock at night, CNN tells me my side lost.
How is that gonna feel?
Might keep people home.
I don't know. So there are far more variables than just that one, but I haven't heard anybody talk about that one, and I would say it's in the top five of big variables that will make a difference.
Probably in the top five.
That said, I'm not deeply invested in whatever happens in the midterms, because I think this specific president might do fine with a mixed Congress.
He might be able to make some deals.
It might actually work in his favor.
I just don't think you can go from, you know, we don't want it, to it's a disaster if it happens.
Those things are not necessarily connected.
You could not want it, but also not know if it's good or bad.
Let's talk about healthcare.
I think the Let me just check the time here.
Got a little bit of time. I think healthcare is a strong position for the left.
And that they're smart to ride that.
Because it's sort of a free money.
Who doesn't want free money? For the people who don't have healthcare, it looks like free money.
So that seems like a pretty motivating thing.
It's like voting yourself a raise, basically.
I think the right needs to do a better job of highlighting the technology I saw and how regulations affect things.
I just tweeted a story about a doctor who wanted to have his own, I think it was an MRI, in his own practice, but he couldn't do it because there's a law that says only the hospital can do it.
Did you know that? There's some stupid law, at least in the one state, that said that only the hospitals could have the big machines and therefore it would cost you thousands of dollars for what the doctor would happily charge you $500 for.
And probably that's multiplied by thousands of things that are that stupid.
Imagine, if you will, a Republican health plan that says, let's use competition, let's use new technology, let's see if we can organize all these new technologies into some kind of a package of low-cost healthcare.
Maybe it's only for poor people.
Maybe it's only for people paying cash.
There may be a million ways to slice this, but it seems to me that the Republicans are just not playing in this game, and it's so easy.
All they'd have to do is push the technical and rule change, get rid of some regulations, have more competition.
You could come up with a package of how to move forward towards something like Full coverage of healthcare without doing any kind of a tax-and-spend single-payer thing, if you wanted to.
And I'm puzzled why the administration isn't pushing that.
It's like low-hanging fruit.
It's right there. It's free.
All right. The White House is rolling out healthcare plans, somebody said.
I don't know that, but I'll look for that.
And I will talk to you all later.
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