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Aug. 30, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
59:30
Episode 200 Scott Adams: DeSantis is Being so Inarticulate He Monkeyed up His Campaign
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Hello Austin and Sparkles and Joanne and everybody.
Come on in here. If you're prepared, and I think you probably are, you might already have your beverage.
And if you have a beverage like I have a beverage, You know what comes next.
And it's good.
Oh, it's really good. Bitcoin 7,000?
Well, I hope not.
But maybe.
And now the simultaneous sip.
So you know how I like to talk about the news that's not in the news?
About the negative space?
So sometimes you have to look at the news and then sometimes you have to look at what is suspiciously not in the news and see if it means anything.
And does it mean anything that Iran is not in the news?
Now, you remember they made some threatening noise about the Straits of Hormuz and some retired military people said, well, that would take about five minutes to clear out their entire navy.
But is it my imagination, or did that, which should have been an enormous story dominating all the headlines, just sort of nobody cared?
Isn't it conspicuous and not being news?
I'm blocking whoever Christy is.
Might take a minute.
Seems unblockable. So, it seems to me that we might have a strategy for Iran that looks like this.
And I'll articulate it the way...
I'm not sure I can say articulate anymore.
But I will talk about it in a way that makes it look like a strategy.
Because if I were in charge, this is what my strategy would be.
My strategy would look like this.
Hey, Iran, or North Korea, or any of the countries that we have trouble with...
We don't hate you.
In fact, we'd like to help you out.
But we can't be a trading partner and we can't let you be part of the international commerce if you're, you know, criminals essentially.
If you're aiding terrorists and that sort of thing.
So it's nothing personal.
And you can do whatever you want to do with that.
We're just not going to allow international trade to happen with you.
And just depersonalize it.
Say, that's nothing about anything except you're not above the bar.
That's the minimum bar to be part of the international finance and trade relationship.
And it looks like that's what we're doing.
It looks like we're just strangling their economy in no particular hurry.
It doesn't matter if it takes a year or five years.
It doesn't much matter. So it seems to me that Iran is going to start making noise about, hey, let's talk.
So I would expect to see that pretty soon.
So expect to see Iran make some kind of noise about, hey, maybe we can get past this.
Maybe there's something we can do here.
That doesn't mean that it would be easy to negotiate anything we could live with.
But I'm expecting them to at least make noises about being reasonable, in part because we're not making very loud noises about them.
It gives them some space.
You know, just a little bit of space to say, hey, why don't we talk?
Now, on a periscope either yesterday or the day before, I can't remember, I talked about a news story that turns out to be fake news.
At least that's my current thinking.
And that was that China...
Hacked Hillary's email.
Now you might know that CNN is reporting that they looked for a confirmation from the FBI and the FBI said, nope, we do not confirm that.
And so CNN is reporting it didn't happen.
Now that still leaves, I suppose, some wiggle room that the FBI could be lying or they don't know what somebody else knows or something like that.
But Yeah, the whole courtesy copy for emails to China is apparently fake.
Apparently fake.
Now, that doesn't mean that the debunking of the story is right either.
We live in a world where you can never tell.
But personally, I'm going to treat it as fake news and offer my...
Periscope retraction of anything I said about Chinese hacking of her email.
Now, let's talk about DeSantis and what everybody's talking about in the headlines.
So publications like The Hill and CNN are painting him as a terrible racist and their evidence goes as follows.
That he's running against an African-American man in Florida named Gillum, and that he has said two unfortunate things.
One, he said he doesn't want the voters to monkey up the good results that they're getting with policies, etc., under the Trump administration.
And people say, wait, monkey up isn't even a term.
And you would never say monkey if it weren't a black guy, so it must be obviously racist.
Now on top of that, apparently, and CNN came up with this, I don't know if they were the first to come up with the video, but there's a video of DeSantis also in public referring to his opposition, Gillum, as articulate.
Now, most of you know that articulate is one of those words that racists used to use to act surprised that there was a black person who could sound smart.
So, generally speaking, when you see some famous white person call any black person articulate, your flag goes off and says, boop, boop, boop.
That's a little racist.
So we have two bits of evidence.
That DeSantis is racist.
Those two things.
Now, let me say as clearly as possible, he is a dumbass.
We can be sure about that, at least.
So, it's pretty dumb to use that word articulate.
At the least.
So that's the minimum that he is.
He's pretty dumb to use that word.
He's pretty dumb to make monkey references in this day and age, in that context.
Now, is it racist?
Well, I'll talk about that next.
But at a minimum, it was dumb.
Now, why do I say it's dumb?
If you're arguing with me, it means you're not watching the news.
You walked right into a trap.
Now, if you walk into a trap that's an obvious trap, you can still blame the person who laid the trap.
Sure, nothing would have happened without the trap.
But if you see the trap and you walk right into it, you're a dumbass.
So, I'm sorry.
The minimum that DeSantis has to explain is why he's a dumbass.
That's his minimum level of explaining.
And that's not based on mind reading.
That's based on the fact that he did things which I would have considered obvious mistakes.
They're things I wouldn't have done had I been in my right mind and in that situation.
So let's not defend everything he's done.
At the very least, he was a dumbass twice.
But let's talk about the theory that those are signs that he is a racist.
Suppose DeSantis had said, instead of articulate, suppose he had said, my candidate is very persuasive in talking about his socialist policies.
Would you have considered that racist?
To say that he is very persuasive.
Well, you might not know, unless you look it up, that persuasive is, it's a synonym for articulant.
It's one of the words that is a replacement for it.
So it's not the concept that's the problem.
Because he could have easily said, you know, my opponent, he's a smart guy.
He's very persuasive.
He does a good job representing his side.
But, you know, I have other opinions, blah, blah.
That would not have sounded racist.
But the actual choice of that specific word is given as a signal that he is...
This is the important part.
His critics are saying that he intentionally used that word as a dog whistle, racist secret dog whistle.
And that he also said monkey as sort of a secret dog whistle.
Now let's work through the thinking of his critics.
According to his critics, he was intentionally using those words to let people who are voters know the following things.
And correct me if I'm wrong about this.
So the critics' theory of DeSantis is Is that he was thinking privately.
They're reading his mind.
And they're saying, you know, well, obviously this is what he was thinking.
So his critics think he was obviously thinking that sounding like an obvious big ol' racist would help him get more votes.
Just let that marinate for a moment.
DeSantis' critics...
Believe that in his private thoughts, he was thinking, you know, I'm not sure people can tell my critic is black.
I'd better send some secret dog whistles.
And if I do, I'll send the kind of secret dog whistles that are the obvious kinds.
Not the really super secret ones.
I'll send the ones that are so obvious that it will be a headline news and I'll be called a racist from now until the rest of my life.
But yeah, that could work.
I think I'm gonna get some extra votes by outing myself as a giant racist while I'm running for governor and have major visibility and a connection to President Trump.
I don't see the downside of this.
Okay, I'm going to go with the plan.
And then he executed his plan to get more votes by framing himself as a huge racist and wait for it.
Here's the best part. He's framed himself as an inarticulate racist to get more votes.
That's what his critics think he did.
Now, as I said, no matter what he was thinking internally, we can conclude he was certainly a dumbass.
But was he that dumb?
I mean, there's dumb, and there's dumber than a stone.
It's dumb to use those words, because I think anybody his age, his level of experience, should have known to avoid those phrases and words, even though they're common words and phrases.
Should have been smart enough to avoid them.
He wasn't. But was he that dumb that he thought his voters couldn't tell he was running against a black guy?
And that he needed to slip in some clues?
Because I'm pretty sure they saw pictures of his opponent.
And however dumb you think his voters are, I'm almost positive they noticed that he was a white guy running against a black guy.
Did he need to tell them?
But wait, the critics are saying more than that.
They're not saying, no, no, no.
He's not just telling us his opponent is black.
It's more than that.
He's also telling us his opponent is smart.
Because that's what articulate means.
Articulate means you're really good with words, you're persuasive, you're smart.
You can't really be articulate without also being smart, right?
Those are joined.
So by talking about his opponent...
As being smart and African-American in a country that just had eight years of an African-American president and kind of like them.
It's sort of a good place to be right now if you're running for office, frankly.
So the critics believe that DeSantis thought that making himself look like an inarticulate idiot...
Would somehow get him more votes because his voters are even dumber than he is.
Or something like that.
So, I can't defend.
I know somebody by tomorrow, there'll be a headline in the Hill saying, cartoonist defends racist.
I'm not doing that.
What I'm saying is, I don't know what he's thinking.
But it's obvious that he chose two words that are clearly a mistake based on the fact that there was a bad result and based on the fact that you and I probably would have seen it coming and would have avoided it.
I mean, I certainly would have.
Now, will he if somebody says he's going to win no matter what?
Who's actually ahead in the polling?
I don't actually know that.
Let me update one more thing.
I completely agree that there was a time in history that if a white person said a black person was articulate, it was nothing but racist.
Certainly there was a time in history that was completely true.
But when you're running against a candidate who absolutely belongs where he is, which is running for governor, he earned it.
He earned it in every way you can earn that sort of thing.
And in that situation, running for governor of a major state against someone who, you know, I believe Gillum has a hell of a resume, right?
Doesn't he have military? He's got this great resume.
He's been a mayor. When you call somebody who has reached that level of success articulate, I don't know if it means the same thing.
At what point do you just modernize your thinking to the point where it's just another way to call somebody a good representative of their team, their team's policies that you don't agree with?
Because articulate is one of the few words...
And again, let me just say as clearly as possible, he was a dumbass for using that word.
There's no way to defend it, right?
But I'm just walking through the fact that society is evolving.
And sometimes you have to stop and say, okay, are things the same as they were, or do we need to update our thinking?
And what I'm suggesting is that when you're coming off of eight years of a black president, you've got a guy with all kinds of qualifications running for governor, who has a good chance of winning, I suppose.
I don't know what the polls say.
But if you call that guy articulate, It might just mean that you don't want to give him a real compliment, but you need to say something that sounds polite, something that's obviously true, which is he's a good representative of the policies.
And it might be just that.
Now, to go past that, and to imagine...
I'm going to get into the good part now.
Somebody says, boring topic.
No, just wait for the good part.
It's coming up. Here's the good part.
Suppose it's true...
That on some automatic subconscious level, that the reason that DeSantis chose either of those words, either monkey it up or articulate, suppose you said to yourself, the reason he chose those words is that he was sort of subconsciously influenced by the fact that he, you know, maybe lives in a racist part of the country and he's running against an African American man.
So suppose it wasn't conscious.
If it wasn't conscious, is he still a racist?
Can you be an unconscious racist?
Here's my answer to that.
Can you be an unconscious racist?
The answer is yes, because 100% of people are.
100% of people...
of every color, every type, are reflexively racist.
Meaning unconscious, not thinking about it.
It's just a reflex.
To be good people in the year 2018 is not to abandon the fact that your brain is a bad pattern recognition machine, which is what it is.
Your brain looks for patterns and then it acts on those patterns.
But it's not very good at it.
I'm writing a book about this, by the way.
We're not really good at recognizing patterns accurately.
We just see them and we say, ah, every time I see somebody with a hat, they give me a dirty look.
People with hats hate me.
I hate people with hats.
That's not a real pattern.
It's just something that you thought you noticed.
So it is impossible On the reflexive level, where everybody's brain is just a pattern recognition machine, where we all evolved with a natural instinct to prefer the people who look the most like us.
If you've got a twin, you like that twin better than anybody else.
If you've got a family, you probably like them better than anybody else, and they probably look a little bit like you.
You even marry people who sort of look like you.
So the most normal thing for a human being is to prefer people who look a little bit more like themselves than different.
So is DeSantis a reflexive, sort of automatic...
You know, racist on an unconscious level?
Yes, of course.
Just like every one of you.
Just like Gilliam is.
Just like every single person.
They all have that normal.
Now, the test is whether you can think past it.
Can you use your higher levels of thinking, what little do we have, to be a better person than to be a person who judges based on patterns?
What are the people who are saying that DeSantis is a horrible racist doing?
They're judging on a pattern.
So they're seeing a pattern.
Somebody just said in the comments, arguing against my point that we tend to like people who look like us.
Someone just mentioned that my girlfriend, Christina, looks nothing like my, quote, rat ass.
Okay, that's true.
It's a general statement.
But here's the thing.
The thing that makes people good people or bad people is not whether they were born with bad pattern recognition because that would just be all of us.
The higher level thinking, the better person, the more moral or ethical behavior is can you notice when you're doing it and then avoid it?
Now, DeSantis There's no evidence that he's an actual racist.
There is evidence that he's a dumbass who used words that make him look like one.
There's definitely evidence of that.
There may also be evidence that he was subconsciously influenced because he's running against an African-American man and somehow these words just sort of are more likely to come to your mind because you have a mind that just works that way.
Let me give you my example and I've talked about this before.
And I think it's relevant.
I've noticed over my adult life that whenever I'm talking to someone who is black, the odds of me having to use the word black as a color for something in the environment or something that happens naturally in the conversation approaches 100%.
And I can't figure out why that is, other than I'm unconsciously influenced by the fact that I'm talking to somebody who's black.
And I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself and tried to work around the word.
You know, if you're playing checkers, or chess, let's say, do you want the white pieces or the black pieces?
It feels like There are a million reasons that you would say the word black, just talking about the environment.
And I can't tell you how many times I'm in that conversation and I think to myself, okay, the word that's going to come out of my mouth now is black, and I'm just talking about the color of my phone case.
But why am I, and I actually catch myself and I say, would I have said this except that I'm talking to somebody black?
Would I have even thought of even this conversation or this line of reasoning?
And the answer is, maybe not.
Maybe not. We might actually be influenced by our environment, what we're looking at, what we're thinking of, thinking about the context, all that stuff all seeps into your choice of words and it's sort of automatic.
So, here's the bottom line of this.
If we are mind reading based on people's choice of words that are otherwise words that have normal meanings, such as the monkey reference and the articulate reference, if we think that those are good enough for us to judge the inner thoughts, the morality, the ethical behavior, the higher moral reason of this senator, we're just being idiots.
We could certainly say, because it's the way normal minds work, that there's a good chance that the reason he chose those words is because he was running against a black candidate, and the vocabulary seeps into your thinking, which is not an indication of how he would act.
It's not an indication of what he thinks is how he should be.
It's not an indication of his own self...
It's not an indication that he's gonna teach his kids to be racist.
It's not an indication that he's sending any secret bat whistles to the racist.
It's not an indication of any of that.
It's an indication that when you enter a topic and that's your context you you tend to introduce words that are sort of about that topic and you do it automatically he's still a dumbass for using those words no defending how smart it was okay but to go the extra level and say therefore In his inner thoughts, which we cannot see, we judge him to be a racist.
I ask you, would you want to be judged by that same standard?
Not about racism, necessarily.
But should you be punished because other people believe you have inner thoughts that are bad?
Is that the world you want to live in?
I certainly would like to live in a world where if people do bad things...
They might have consequences.
But if you want to live in a world where thinking bad things in someone else's opinion, someone else's opinion of your personal inner thoughts that you have not expressed, if you want to be judged by that standard, I suggest we've got big problems.
I'll just get rid of the insulter.
All right.
So did anything I say there sound reasonable?
Oh, let's talk about sloppy Carl Bernstein.
There are too many people in the news with Steen or Stein in their last name because I have a terrible time remembering which it is.
Is it Feinstein? Is it Feinstein?
Is it Bernstein? Is it Bernstein?
But I think it's Steen in both cases.
So let's... And by the way, if you were just watching this out of context, you would say, my God, that guy must be anti-Semitic or something because he's making fun of people with Jewish last names.
So if you saw anything out of context, you would make assumptions about me.
But I think most of you know that I've mispronounced just about everybody's last name on this periscope at one point or another.
So let's look at the president's tweets.
I want to see the Bernstein tweet.
There's a lot of tweeting going on here.
He's been busy. Bear with me.
It looks like he gave Jeff Zuckerberg a nickname, Little Jeff Z. So here's a tweet from three hours ago from the president.
The hatred and extreme bias of me by CNN has clouded their thinking and made them unable to function.
But actually, as I have always said, this has been going on for a long time.
Little Jeff Z, meaning Jeff Zuckerberg, Has done a terrible job.
His ratings suck.
And AT&T should fire him to save credibility.
AT&T should fire him?
What the hell? Oh, there's a story from 11 hours ago about Kanye West says Trump wants to be the greatest president for black Americans.
That's in Breitbart. I've got to read that.
Alright, come on.
You've got so many tweets.
Almost all of his tweets were about CNN for a while there.
Alright, here it is. CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake.
Sloppy Carl Bernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country.
Well, that's literally true.
Fake news.
So he's calling Carl Bernstein.
Sloppy Carl Bernstein who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool.
That's probably...
Now, I thought...
Now, my first impression was, hey, he's reusing his insults because I thought Michael Moore was sloppy and I thought Steve Bannon was sloppy, but now Carl Bernstein is sloppy.
So not only did Carl get insulted, but he got a third-hand insult.
You can imagine this imagination of the president tweeting and thinking, I've got to give this guy a nickname.
How about Crummy Carl?
Nah, that's no good. He's not worth a fresh nickname.
I'm going to give him a stale nickname.
I'm going to give him a nickname that used to belong to Michael Moore and Steve Bannon.
Live with that, sloppy Carl Bernstein.
Alright, what else is going on?
So North Korea is getting interesting.
So the path for North Korea probably looks like this.
Because North Korea and the United States are not...
As belligerent as before, meaning that the President and Kim Jong-un at least seem to have some kind of chemistry.
We're able to withstand the little bumps of the negotiations.
You know, we'll withdraw from this or you're not being serious because the relationship looks credible.
So, right now, China is allegedly being soft on North Korea because it puts pressure on the United States and maybe that has to do with our trade negotiations.
So, Trump has sort of taken North Korea off the table.
By saying that he has no reason to spend a bunch of money on war games, it looks like he's going to negotiate a trade deal with China first, take that off the table, and then get back to North Korea.
But before he can get China to the table, he probably has to get Canada to the table.
It looks like, or at least the reporting from the Trump administration is that things might be close.
It might be close with Canada.
So if we get Mexico and Canada on board for trade, then maybe you get something going in Europe, and then China will have more of a More of a difficulty explaining why they're the odd country out.
Why is it China, its own citizens will ask it?
Hey, why is it that only China can't reach an agreement?
Is it because we're asking for too much?
Or is it because we're being unreasonable and it's hurting us?
So I think you're seeing the squeeze play from both sides.
So you're seeing President Trump and President Xi in China, two very capable negotiators who are using every tool at their disposal to get an advantage.
And it's kind of interesting.
It's kind of interesting.
All right. Excuse me.
Excuse me. Because of neo-imperialism.
You know, when I see words like that, neo-imperialism, there's some words that just signal to me that somebody's not a clear thinker.
The labeling stuff is always like a flag.
If somebody's calling somebody a fascist or a racist or a neo-imperialist, any of those sort of generic labels...
Usually that's not a deep thinker.
You know, whoever's slapping those labels on stuff.
Oh, let me ask you something about socialism.
So I'm going to change my criticism from CNN to Fox News now because I'm fair.
I'm a fair pundit, sometimes.
And let's talk about Fox News.
Now, I criticized them for making a big deal out of the tragedy with, I forget her first name, Tibbetts, the woman killed by someone who was illegal.
And I argued, as did Geraldo, I believe, on Fox News, that focusing on this one crime comes off as racist.
Because you can have opinions on the border, but if you're focusing on an anecdote, it's because you're doing it to persuade.
Molly Tibbetts, yes, thank you.
You're doing it to persuade, and you're doing it to persuade because of the racial difference.
So to me, it's illegitimate to focus too much on any anecdote, whatever it is.
But it's also very effective.
So if I'm being honest, and I like to sometimes remove the ethical consideration from the tool so you can see them clearly individually, it's probably pretty persuasive to hammer on that one example.
Now, I see the three question marks.
Are you saying it's racist?
Let me be more clear, because I may have been a little unclear.
It comes off as racist.
So I'm not saying that I can see in the inner thoughts of anybody who made any decisions on Fox News.
So nothing like that's happening.
So I'm not assuming that in their inner thoughts that they are racist.
What I am saying is that like using the word articulate, like using the word monkey if you're running against an African American man, you should know...
Anybody's going to see this as a little bit racist.
So I think that was bad programming choice, but good persuasion.
So I don't like it for all the ethical, moral reasons, but as a persuasion method, it probably is effective and I don't like that.
But here's the other complaint about Fox News lately.
I'm seeing them going after the Bernie, let's say the Bernie protégés, the Alexandra Cortez, last name I can't remember, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
Got it.
So I see Fox going after her and other people who have some socialist leaning and calling them socialists or communists.
And oversimplifying their positions to that degree just feels illegitimate.
It's just persuasion.
it's not reporting.
Now if the opinion people do it, I get that.
So here's my question to you.
Now, this is a serious question.
For those of you who believe that Alexandra and Bernie and even Gilliam, for those of you who would label them socialist, I have a quiz for you.
Is Uber socialist?
Because what Uber does is allow many people to share a car.
Now it's an organized process for doing that with a driver who actually has ownership.
But Uber is a way to share resources.
Is Uber a socialist idea?
Does anybody think that?
It's voluntary, so it's okay.
Okay. Is social not socialist?
It's voluntary?
Somebody says clearly not.
No, no, no. Okay, so those are the answers I thought I would get.
So you would all agree.
That sharing resources is not socialist.
Because Uber does it.
You do it in lots of different contexts where people share resources.
If you go to a hotel, it's a shared resource.
Lots of people stay in the same hotel.
All right. Yeah, somebody just said hotels at the same time I did.
So let me ask you this.
Suppose one of these socialists came up with the following plan.
Are you ready for this?
Suppose they came up with a plan for single-payer health care, but they said it's optional.
So the only people who have to be in the plan where it's universal health care are the roughly half of the country who think it's a good idea.
And the other half can do whatever they want.
They can use the free market.
They can not have anything.
Do whatever they want. Would you be okay with that if there was a single-payer plan and the only...
Hold on. Here's the best part.
And the only people who paid for it, including any debt it incurred, were the people who opted in.
Would you be okay with a half, let's say, a half socialist solution where you don't have to be part of it and you don't have to pay for it?
And if it all goes wrong, it has nothing on you.
As long as you can get your private insurance and your private healthcare, would you care if half the company chose a public option that was only siloed off to half of the country?
Somebody says it's still state socialism, so it's bad.
No, that's not a reason.
You have to give a reason.
Because in this scenario, the socialist silo would be competing in the same country against the free market.
So if the free market did a better job, those people would be completely free to just jump over and be in the free market.
It doesn't work.
Well, so let us suspend for a moment the question of whether it would work.
Because I don't think we know exactly.
I don't know exactly why it wouldn't work.
But I'm testing your thinking.
Now, when somebody says that's fantasy land, keep in mind this is a mental exercise.
I'm not assuming that anything like that will happen.
But I'm testing your definition of socialism.
If your definition of socialism is that as long as you have a choice of being in it or not, you're okay.
But it's also a question of whether the government is involved or not.
So let's go to another level.
Let's say that the government is not part of this.
Let's say that the socialists themselves self-organize.
So that whoever is in charge of it is not the government of the United States, but maybe just some management entity, kind of like Kaiser HMO. And it's just siloed off, and they have universal health care, but they also pay for it.
So their taxes would be siloed off, and they pay more for their taxes to pay for their own health care.
But the other half of the country doesn't have anything to do with it.
It's not your government that's involved.
It's not your money.
It will never be your money.
Under those conditions, would you say that that is socialism?
I don't think so.
So here's my point.
When you label something socialist, it just sort of sweeps it off the table because it lumps it in with every other socialist thing in the past that didn't work.
It conflates it with communism that didn't work, and all other kinds of things that didn't work.
Instead of conflating it with, say, the fact that European countries have universal health care, there are plenty of situations where we share resources to lower costs.
So there are components of socialism That work in all kinds of situations.
The components do, right?
So if you could take away the bad components of socialism and keep the good parts, which are, you know, in this case, the good part would be everybody has health care.
But other people in that silo that are supporting them might have higher taxes.
But they would be okay with that.
Here's the key. The people paying the higher taxes in this scenario Would be okay with it.
Because they're doing it voluntarily.
So that the other people in their silo can have healthcare.
Is that socialist?
I don't know. Can you get the real Scott back on?
Does somebody think I'm out of character today?
What you've described is just a private insurance group.
Well, it's a private insurance group in which everybody who joins a group gets insurance, even if they can't afford it.
So a private insurance group Still requires everybody to pay a premium.
So I'm suggesting that even if you can't pay anything, you can still join that group and just give free healthcare.
Pay no taxes at all.
Because the people who will pay for you are the people who are also in the group and also believe that their taxes should go to pay for other people.
It's all voluntary.
You're a conflating issue, man.
I might be, but this is a mental experiment, so I don't know what you mean.
So if you could be more specific about what I have conflated, you might have a point.
I just don't know what it is.
Yeah, so the main point is, if you take away two things, the requirement, in other words, you're not forced to do it, And it's not necessarily the government that you elected that's the boss of it all.
And it doesn't cost you anything.
Under those conditions, do you care if there's some socialism?
Because you don't care about Uber.
Because it's not the government.
you don't have to use Uber.
Dale has possessed Scott.
So I think some of you...
Some of you are having a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that there might be some way to give people things that other people would call socialism without it hurting anybody.
So what I described might not be practical, you know, probably isn't.
But the fact is, it would meet all of your requirements for you not being involved in socialism.
The guarantee.
Yeah, so somebody says, the problem is the guarantee.
So if the government is giving you health care, there's sort of a guarantee they can just raise taxes if they need to.
But I'm saying that if you, you know, you could also make a rule that says the only people who ever pay those raised taxes are the people who opted in, and the other people don't have to.
So in a hypothetical world, that wouldn't be a problem.
Where does the money come from?
In this example, it would come from the taxes of the people who opted in, but not the taxes of the people who did not opt in.
So you would just have a different tax rate for people who opted in or not.
No one rides Uber for free.
Right. I'm not saying Uber is like this.
Uber is an example of something with a shared resource.
The Uber example was just to show you that you could have a shared resource without the other elements of the coercion or the government.
And can you put together the good parts of socialism without the bad parts?
Definitely not practical.
I'm not sure why, but I'm not also arguing that it's practical.
Is a prison socialist?
No. Is a prison socialist?
Somebody asked. Let's see, the government runs the prison and you don't have a choice about going in.
That's a very clever question.
Yeah, analogies are, you can see that the analogies are bad.
Yeah, and the Venezuela example, it drives me crazy because Venezuela compared to America is sort of like me comparing Uber to healthcare.
If you're trying to make a specific point, as I did with Uber, which is, hey, there's a shared resource.
It's the only point of the analogy.
But then people get caught up in the, well, wait a minute.
Uber has an app.
That's different than healthcare.
I'm like, no, no, no, that's not even the point.
I'm not talking that all...
I'm not saying that Uber is exactly like healthcare.
There's just one part of it that I'm making an analogy, just the shared resource part.
Likewise with Venezuela, when I hear anybody say, Venezuela is failing because they're socialist, I say to myself, ah...
They are socialists and they are failing, but I feel like we need to dig into this a little bit more.
Because there are clearly European countries who are a little bit socialist that are working out.
It could be that everything about Venezuela worked except privatizing businesses, for example.
I don't know if that's true. But it could be that what's wrong with Venezuela are some specific things.
It's not all of socialism and every possible thing that socialism does.
Venezuela is not failing because they have universal healthcare, for example.
I think mostly it's failing because of the privatizing of the businesses, but I frankly don't follow events in Venezuela, so I don't know.
Europe has been socialist on the backs of America.
That's a good point. We do subsidize Europe by being effectively their military, on top of their own military.
Somebody said Uber is not Venezuela, Scott.
That's the dumbest thing anybody's ever said on my Periscope.
So after I just gave a whole description of how analogies cannot be used to compare, you know, to say the two things are the same, somebody says, alright, you went nail on me.
Somebody just gets on here and says, Scott, are you saying that Uber and Venezuela are not the same things?
How dumb can you be?
No, I'm not saying that.
But you can argue it all day long.
Just don't involve me because I'm not part of that conversation.
So those of you who are having imaginary conversations in your head in which you're arguing against the thing you imagined that I said, knock yourself out.
Hitler was a socialist.
Here are things I hate because they're stupid.
Hitler is a socialist.
KKK used to be Democrats.
Those two things are so frickin' dumb that when I hear them my brain just goes like it struggles inside my head.
Those things can be true Without having any relevance to today.
Just no relevance.
It is not true that because Denmark has socialized medicine that they're right on the verge of creating the Holocaust.
So to say that Hitler was a socialist or Nazis were socialists, it doesn't tell you anything.
It doesn't tell you anything.
Except that Hitler himself was a terrible monster.
And the fact that the KKK may have been started by Democrats or mostly Democrats, I don't care.
Because the past is gone.
The past doesn't exist.
If somebody's 18 and they register as a Democrat, do I hold it against them that in 1930 or whenever there was somebody who was also a Democrat who was in the KKK? Do I hold that against an 18-year-old who's signing up to be a Democrat because they want health care and don't want to pay for it?
I mean, it's ridiculous to bring that into the future.
Oh, somebody said Pope Dale, which made me think of the Pope.
How many of you think the Pope can keep his job under the current controversy of...
There's a semi-creditable allegation that he knew about child abuse, at least in one case, and was soft on it.
That's a bad choice of words.
How many think the Pope can keep his job?
I'm just looking for your comments here.
They're a little bit behind. Yeah, I've got people out here saying that Uber is Hitler and KKK is Hitler.
Yeah, just stop using Hitler and ancient KKK history to make any point about 2018 is remarkable.
Socialists tend to be authoritarian.
and the other thing that I've been doing That might even be true, but it's not relevant.
Those of you who have reflexive problems, well, let me not get into that again.
So nobody thinks the Pope is going to have to lose his job, it looks like.
But, man, that is bad for the brand.
Very bad for the brand.
And with the Pope, isn't there a complaint that he hasn't spoken out about the controversy somewhat directly?
Because he's been accused of something pretty specific.
And I don't know that he's spoken on the topic yet.
Pope is a socialist.
Every time, let me tell you, every time that somebody gets called a socialist, I think the person saying it is not credible.
They're not credible.
If you say there's an element of socialism you don't like or didn't work or we know it doesn't work, I think that's valid.
But just to say, socialism.
Socialism. I think that's the right's version of racist.
When the left is out of ammo, they'll say to the right, ah, you're all racist.
And when the right is out of ammo, they call the left socialist.
It's just sort of an out of ammo thing to say.
Socialism eventually requires force.
Yes.
Yeah. Full socialism would eventually require force.
But I've never heard anybody suggest such a thing.
Even the people who are talking about socialism, I think you have to see them as Trump-like persuaders who know they're asking for something like fuller socialism, which would include income equality and such, which you could only do at gunpoint.
The people who are asking for that stuff, they appear to me as negotiators who really want health care and education.
And it seems to me that if America wants to be great, that we should have at least as good an education and healthcare system as other countries.
If we don't have as good a systems as other countries, and you could argue whether we do or not, but in terms of coverage, we have a worse system.
Yeah, we can't be that great without figuring out how to do those things.
Now, I think you can get there with something that looks more like innovation.
So I'd like to get to the point where everybody has healthcare, everybody has free education or close to it because of the way we innovated, not because the government made you do it or made your taxes higher.
Does capitalism require force?
Of course. So somebody said that socialism eventually requires government force.
And then somebody else said, doesn't capitalism require force?
Of course it does. You are in a system that only exists because if you got outside of the system, the government would literally kill you.
You are in a system at the end of the barrel of a gun.
You don't get a choice about paying your taxes.
What's my prediction on the Pope?
I was asking all of you because I wanted to get a read on the public feeling about him.
And if most of you had said, oh, he's got to go, he's got to go, then I would have said, oh, that's probably how other people are feeling too, or at least there would be enough conservatives who think that it would be hard for him to be a credible pope.
But very few of you said he needs to go.
Yeah, I mean, some people did.
But it seemed like the predominant opinion was, eh, eh, Whatever.
Let the Catholics work it out.
And the fact that there wasn't much caring, meaning there wasn't much emotion around it here, leads me to believe that the Pope will stay in office.
So there's my prediction.
My prediction is that there isn't enough emotional concern about this topic.
To remove him from office, which is different from I'm not giving you an opinion about whether he should be removed.
That's up to the religion.
You know, I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a vote.
They certainly have every right to be represented by whoever they want.
But my guess is there's not enough emotion around this to force him out of office.
They do forgive.
I'm not sure the forgiving kicks in until there's some apologizing and some recognizing of what you did wrong.
So we don't have that yet.
My followership is not the public, correct?
But you would expect that the conservatives would be the The tip of the spear in terms of being angry at the Pope for this particular offense.
Because people on the right tend to make a big deal about and should about child abuse.
So if the people on the right are concerned, And when I say not concerned, I mean not at a highly emotional level, they're just concerned.
Then I'd say he's fine.
I'm going to sign off now. We've gone long enough.
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