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Sept. 22, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:13
Episode 230 Scott Adams: James Woods, Rosenstein, Ellison and Kavanaugh
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Hey, it's Saturday.
Is anybody up? I know it's early.
It's a weekend. But it's time for you all to get in here so that we can enjoy the ultimate thrill That's called coffee with Scott Adams.
To participate, you'll need some kind of a vessel that holds a liquid.
It could be a cup, a mug, a stein, a chalice.
But then, you must raise it to your lips simultaneously, and you must sip with us.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Oh yeah! Oh yeah!
That's the good stuff right there.
Tea is okay. We allow tea.
Tea is allowed. Alright, let's talk about a few things.
I just tweeted. There's more talk about North Korea going in the right direction.
An article on Fox News' site that I just tweeted in my Twitter feed a moment ago.
And there was one thing in there that caught my eye.
So apparently the local North Korean press, which typically would be reporting stuff like, our nuclear weapons are our silver sword of greatness.
Our nuclear arsenal is so powerful.
We are the greatest. So normally North Korea would be bragging about their nuclear weapons.
It turns out that the internal government-controlled press is saying stuff like North Korea is planning to denuclearize and become, quote, a cradle of peace.
They've actually said that they want to become a cradle of peace.
So they've completely changed their internal...
This is the point.
It's their own internal government-controlled press...
Preparing the people of North Korea for denuclearization.
What is the step that Kim Jong-un should do before any serious actual physical denuclearization?
He's got to prepare his people, right?
So he's got to make sure that his people see this framed as a great victory.
In my opinion, This is a great victory.
So if Kim Jong Un reframes giving up his nukes as a great victory, he's not lying.
That would be as truthful as anything could ever be in this world.
Personally, I think Kim Jong Un should get a Nobel Prize or share in one.
If he keeps going the direction he's going, and they fully denuclearize.
Because remember, you can't get there without him, and he's not the one who started the North Korean nuclear program.
You could argue that whatever Kim Jong-un does is harder, riskier, braver, than anything that anybody else involved is doing, including President Trump.
So let's not leave Kim Jong-un out of any conversations about a Nobel Peace Prize.
I know, I know, dictator did lots of things that can't be excused.
But one of the things that the Nobel Prize tries to do Is reward people for moving in the right direction.
So the Nobel Prize is not about what you used to do.
It's not about that.
It's what you're doing now.
What did you do recently?
Are you moving in the right direction right now?
And he is, as far as we can tell.
So there could be something great.
I see it as an either three or four way Nobel Prize.
And I think that would be the best way to do it, assuming everything goes in the right direction.
It should be Moon and Kim should be in there, Trump should be in there, and President Xi, because I don't think you get there without China, no matter what.
That's my opinion. Alright, let's talk about James Woods being suspended temporarily, I guess.
from Twitter for a meme that involved, so it's a joke meme that he passed around that got him suspended and it shows three twenty-something men with big smiles and I have to tell you this so you can get why it's funny.
So without knowing this, you're not going to get the joke.
So that's the only reason I'm going to describe these three men this way.
The phrase beta males would somewhat easily be associated with the three men in the picture.
I'm not saying they are.
I'm just saying that the way the picture was taken, the poses they were in, the clothes they're wearing, the smiles on their faces, projects sort of a beta male vibe, which is the heart of the joke.
What the joke was in the caption is said that they were planning to make the woman's vote more important By not voting.
And it acted like they were trying to start a movement of Democrat males not voting because if the men don't vote, the women's vote will be more important.
Now, of course, it should be obvious to anybody that if men don't vote on the Democrat side, the Democrats won't get anything.
So it would be stupid as well as, you know, submissive behavior.
So that's what's funny about it.
It's not just weak men.
The joke is that they're being weak in a way that's not even useful to anybody.
Like it doesn't even help the people that they're surrendering to in this case.
So it's hilarious.
Because it's cruel and insightful in this weird way, and it sort of matches something you had in the back of your head, which was, what kind of men are Democrats anyway, lately?
Historically, Democrats were just like everybody else, but lately.
What kind of a man joins the party that doesn't like men?
So it hits all of those points in your head that are funny, and I laughed.
But here's the great part of the story.
So somebody reminds me, it was developed on 4chan.
I believe that's the story.
And it's not real.
So it's not a real movement.
It's a joke about a real movement.
It's a joke about a movement, and none of it's real.
And Twitter suspended him for, it looked like the reason given on their little official statement that you get is that he was trying to influence the election with fake information.
Did you get that?
Twitter banned, suspended him for a while, two days or whatever it is, because his meme was considered to be trying to influence the election with fake news, basically.
Now, I love everything about this.
I love everything about this story.
The first thing I love is that in order for that ban to make sense, you have to think that it actually would influence the election.
Now, do you think that that meme would influence the election?
In other words, it wasn't just inaccurate.
The joke part of it wasn't just not true.
There is no movement of that type.
So that part, the fact that it was untrue, fits Twitter's criteria.
And it was about an election.
And if people believed it was true, it might influence the election.
So let me give you my ruling.
Did this violate Twitter's stated and quite reasonable Terms of service, which is you shouldn't be sending out lies, at least intentionally.
You shouldn't intentionally be making stuff up, as opposed to just being wrong or having the wrong opinion.
You shouldn't be making stuff up to influence an American election.
And I think to myself, that's a reasonable rule.
You could argue that maybe it would be good if everybody could say everything, but on a private service, it's a private company, it's not a government company, they would like a standard in which if somebody just made something up and it could actually influence the election, they would prefer not to be the platform that does that.
I'm going to say that's fair.
Now you do have a problem of maybe discerning when somebody makes something up and when it's just wrong.
You know, that could be dicey.
That's why humans are making the decisions, not machines.
There's going to be a lot of gray area.
But the general idea that you don't want Twitter accidentally throwing an election to the wrong person or just a different person because somebody made a good meme.
Think about it. Would you want your election determined by a really good meme that was just false, that just made up.
I wouldn't. So here's where I'm going to surprise you.
That meme was actually pretty powerful.
Now even though it's claimed that there was a movement of men who were not going to vote, even though the claim was transparently ridiculous, would people believe it?
Let me ask you. For most of us, the meme was transparently ridiculous, obviously a joke.
Do you believe, well I'll put it in a percentage, what percentage of the public do you think could see that meme and believe it was true?
Give me a percentage.
What percentage of the public do you think would not know that was just a joke?
There's a little time lag between your comments.
I'd say maybe 30%, somewhere in that range.
Something like 30% of the country, or the world, as I tell you over and over again, approximately 30% of the world doesn't know a joke.
Actually, literally doesn't know joke.
I'm not insulting them.
This is not a criticism of them.
I'm saying that humans are different.
We all have different capabilities.
And in the same way that I'm not good at recognizing musical tones, I actually have a gene that makes me not good at that.
I had my DNA tested, and I'm not good at recognizing and appreciating music.
And sure enough, that seems to be the case in my life.
Surely there are people who don't recognize or appreciate humor.
And as a professional humorist, I guarantee you that's true.
And it's a big chunk of the public, maybe a third.
That's my personal estimate, not based on science.
So if a third of the people looked at that meme and thought it was true, could that influence an election?
My vote? One who has studied persuasion for decades, wrote a book on it.
I'm a professional hypnotist.
Here's my opinion.
Yes. Yes.
That meme was powerful enough that it could move the dial.
It was. But not exactly in the way that maybe your first guess would be.
I don't think...
I think most people wouldn't think it was real, and the people who thought it was real would be influenced not necessarily in the way you think.
What it would do is it would make it harder for a man who did not identify with those three guys in the picture to vote Republican.
Because a man who thought, well, I'm an independent thinker, I'm a rebel, You know, I'm an alpha male.
Whatever this group of males are thinking, if they're looking at that meme, they're going to say, I don't want to be on that team.
They're going to be saying, get me as far away from that as you can because it looks dumb and weak.
And so some number of people would actually be influenced by that meme.
So here's my final judgment on it.
Twitter, I believe, and you know me, right?
You know I don't hold back on my criticisms of shadow banning or anything.
I've been trying to be as objective as possible and not leap to conclusions without the evidence.
But I haven't been shy about criticism of social media.
In this specific case, I hate to tell you, I think Twitter got it right.
Because this was a meme about something that wasn't true, and it did have the power to influence an election.
It was that good. And so basically this is just a comment on how good the meme was.
So even though it was not, you know, I think it was made as a joke primarily.
But it doesn't matter who intended it to be a joke.
If somebody was likely to believe it, and that's guaranteed.
Guaranteed. Some people, some percentage of the public, guaranteed would believe it.
That's also what makes it funny.
It's funny because it's close to that line of being believable.
That's what makes it funny.
So you guarantee that when you get close to that line of, wait a minute, I'm not even sure this is a joke.
Is that real? Okay, that's a joke.
And then you laugh. That's what makes it funny, because it got right up to the line.
I think Twitter has a defensible position, even if you would have done it a little differently.
But they have guidelines.
The guidelines are reasonable.
We don't want people influencing elections in that way by just making stuff up.
Nobody wants that.
And I think that they followed their own process.
Two-day suspension, no big deal.
James Woods is not harmed in any way.
But the information that Twitter has this standard is now spread to the rest of us, right?
You and I didn't know that Twitter had this kind of a standard with this kind of a nuance that would be suspending somebody for two days in this way.
We didn't know that, right? We just found that out.
So did Twitter come out ahead?
Yes. They've now spread that message far wider.
Is James Woods a victim?
Not really.
We're all talking about him.
Right? James Woods lost nothing.
He had two days off from Twitter.
He probably had two good days.
So nobody lost.
They supported a rule that was kind of reasonable.
I think we'd all like it if we can figure out how not to get that rule wrong.
You wouldn't want to You don't want to over apply it, but it's a reasonable standard.
Alright, let's move on.
There's an interesting angle to the Rod Rosenstein story.
Rosenstein? God, I am so lost in all the Feinsteins and Rosensteins.
Is it ever Steen or is it always Stein?
Is it always Stein every time?
I'm terrible with this.
Anyway, let's call him Rod.
So there's an angle to this story that I haven't seen anybody talk about.
And to me, it's by far the most important part of the story.
So here it comes.
This is the most important part of the Rod Rosenstein story, and one that I don't think you've heard.
You've heard it, but you haven't figured out its importance yet.
So apparently Rosenstein said, In his denial, non-denial about what he allegedly said in the meeting.
So this is all based on the New York Times report that Rosenstein had at least brainstormed about or spitballed about the notion of the 25th Amendment, which is removing a president from office, and that he talked about or joked about You know, wearing a wire. What do you want me to do?
Wear a wire. But there are reports, some people say he was joking and sarcastic.
Some people think he was serious.
I've weighed in and said, you know, even as long as there are people who say it was a joke and they were in the room and it's more than one person, that leans very heavily toward it was a joke.
Or that he was being sarcastic or angry, or he was just talking in a way you talk privately that's different than the way you talk publicly.
And it probably didn't mean what it's reported to mean.
But here's the important part of the story.
Would you say that Rosenstein is not a friend of the president right now?
You'd all agree with that statement, right?
If you were going to line people up on who's kind of pro-Trump and who's anti-Trump, take away the party affiliations, because there are Republicans who are anti-Trump as well.
You take that away.
Is Rosenstein pro-Trump or on the other camp?
I think you'd agree that Rosenstein has been such a recipient of Trump's wrath That there's no way in the world that Rosenstein could be biased, sort of personally biased, in favor of the president.
Would you all agree with the first point?
That Rosenstein's bias, if he has any, and he's a professional, right?
So he's a professional whose very job depends on removing bias from his actions, but we're all human.
If he has a bias, you'd all agree.
I think you'd all agree that it's anti-Trump.
Maybe it wasn't before.
Might not have been anti-Trump before.
But right now, pretty anti-Trump.
That's the first part of the point.
Here's the second part of the point.
In his denial, non-denial, he said, and I don't have the exact quote, but it was something like this.
I have never personally Had an interaction with the President.
They would suggest the 25th Amendment is appropriate.
Boom! Let that sink in for a moment.
Rod Rosenstein, somebody who's a professional, highly regarded, highly experienced, tapped into the administration, has personal contact with the president, has seen him in action professionally behind closed doors, has seen him up close, has other people that he knows really well who deal with him up close.
Doesn't like the president.
Has every reason to say bad things about him.
Because he's going to get fired anyway, right?
And what did Rod Rosenstein say?
Didn't see any reason to consider the 25th Amendment.
That's the biggest story of this.
Have you seen that reported?
Have you seen it reported that probably the most credible person in this entire administration for that question?
For that question.
Because we know that he doesn't have positive feelings about everything about Trump.
We know that he's playing it pretty, you know, pretty professionally and pretty straight.
And somebody's asking me, what did he say again?
I don't have the exact quote, but it was, he said, he was confirming that he had never personally witnessed anything with President Trump that would suggest the 25th Amendment was appropriate.
It's the one that the critics are saying should be implemented.
It's the one that basically says the president has lost his mind or lost his capabilities.
So remember, that was a serious concern, a serious attack by the opposition.
And now the opposition has A New York Times report which gives everything a little weight, right?
Gives it a lot of weight.
Even if it's wrong, gives it weight.
And that Rod Rosenstein, the most confirmed, probable non-friend to the president, who's probably going to get fired and probably knows it and probably frickin' hates the guy, He is not willing to say that he's seen anything that would suggest the 25th Amendment is appropriate.
It's the biggest story.
Have you seen it reported?
Has anybody seen anybody say what I just told you?
Because it's a big frickin' deal.
Because that was one of the main attacks against the President, and he just took a big bite out of it.
All right. Let's talk about Keith Ellison.
So the story on the right is that Keith Ellison has more credible accusations against him than Kavanaugh and people are not taking the Ellison accusations as seriously.
Now, I had not seen the details of the Ellison accusations until today.
So this morning I saw the reproduction of the medical report in which the girlfriend reported, quote, emotional and physical abuse.
And the report went on to say that there were no physical injuries that they've at least seen.
Or were reported.
So no physical injuries, bad breakup, and the patient tells the doctor that there was emotional and physical abuse.
Have I just described 70% of all breakups?
Emotional abuse is what almost every angry ex says about their husband.
And maybe it's true.
I'm not even saying it's not true.
I'm just saying it's unfortunately so baked into the fabric of human interaction that when people have a bad breakup, They often both say the other was emotionally abusive.
Have I ever been in a relationship that was emotionally abusive?
Have you? Let me ask the men here.
So this is just for the men.
Well, no, I'll make this for everybody.
Male or female, here's the question.
Say yes or no, have you been in an emotionally abusive relationship?
Ever. How many of you have been in an emotionally abusive relationship?
So look at the yes's and no's.
I am in one now, somebody says.
And look at this. These are largely, you've seen, these are all men so far.
Wow. Okay, this is really shocking.
I wasn't quite expecting this answer.
I mean, I thought it would lean this way.
There are a lot of yeses on here from the men.
So look how many people routinely describe their relationship as emotionally abusive.
So that's my first point.
Describing a relationship with an ex as emotionally abusive is unfortunately routine.
So what do we make of the fact that she described it to her doctor?
Unfortunately, no matter how bad it really was, we don't know the facts, never can know the facts on these things.
It looks like background noise because we've all been in that situation and we didn't think we needed to get somebody arrested.
Most of us have been in some kind of situation like that and didn't think it was a police matter.
It just seemed like the fabric of life.
Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't.
Now let's talk about the physical abuse.
According to the medical records, There were no medical reports of physical injuries.
Only her talking about it.
Now, what does an ex consider physical abuse?
Well, it's probably a slightly different standard than you might put on it yourself if you were just watching it and it was people you didn't know.
So I'm not going to excuse any form of physical abuse.
So let me bookmark this by saying, nothing I say is an excuse for any kind of physical, hands-on, in any way.
Not even a little.
So no excuses here.
But it is true that if somebody grabbed somebody by the arm and pulled them or pushed them, that first of all, that could be working in both directions.
It's very typical For both men and women in heated reactions to get a little handsy.
Like the woman punches the guy with the back of her hand.
There's a slap of a face.
There's a pulling somebody from leaving.
Or somebody tries to run away in anger.
You grab their arm and try to talk them back into it.
It's pretty common for relationships to get physical both ways.
In other words, two people who are not really expecting that they're going to hurt each other can still put hands on.
If a woman hits a much bigger man, like she hits him, punches him in the arm or something because she's mad, she's not really expecting to injure him.
Right? If a man grabs a woman by the arm because she's trying to walk away and he just wants to talk sense in her.
Let's say, you know, she's walking away from the car and she's not even going to be safe.
It's a bad decision.
Shouldn't be grabbing people.
So again, I'll bookmark this by saying, not excusing anybody for putting hands on anybody.
No excuses. I'm just saying it's common.
Both ways. Men and women put hands on without the assumption that they're trying to hurt them.
They're just acting a little bit inappropriately, let's say.
So, if somebody put hands on in a relationship, no matter which way it went, male or female, female to male, would that be called physical abuse?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So physical abuse can include physical actions that are not intended to cause actual damage and do not cause any damage or pain.
But by their nature, they can be threatening.
So it could be more assault-like than battery.
But it would still be physical abuse.
So, here's the thing.
In a normal, let's say, high-charged relationship that's not going well, is it possible that both Keith Ellison and the accuser, at any time, put their hands on each other?
Is it possible she had ever pushed or slapped him, knowing it wouldn't hurt him?
Right? Knowing it wouldn't hurt him.
Is it possible he ever grabbed her by the shoulders to talk to her with no intention of hurting her?
But still, if you're the bigger one, that's inappropriate because you're scary and it's assault.
So no excuse of it.
I'm just saying that I think when you see the polls that say only 5% of the Democratic women Believe the accuser?
I think they're putting the frame on it that I just did, which is you need a little bit more than that to get into the credible zone.
So here's my bottom line on the Keith Ellison thing.
You're expecting me to side with you because you want Keith Ellison to be more guilty or more credibly accused than Kavanaugh.
I've looked at both of them, and I would say neither of them meet the standard of certainty.
And they're both well below it.
So in each cases you have to take the accuser seriously because that's the only way our system works.
I don't think we should ever argue that.
Nobody does, I don't think.
So you have to take both the accusers seriously.
You have to find out as much as you can.
You have to let the process do what the process does.
But if you're asking me if I think the Keith Ellison thing is a double standard, I say no.
It is not a double standard.
These are two situations in which there's enough of a gray area for people to be on both sides of this thing.
Plenty of gray area.
So, I don't know what happened in either case.
I'm not disputing what the accusers are saying, not even a little bit.
I'm just saying that we can't know.
They know what happened, but we can't know.
There's enough credibility in the accusations that they have to be taken seriously, but probably we'll never know.
Alright, let's talk about Kavanaugh.
This is probably the thing that gets me kicked off Twitter, if I don't word it right.
There's a story within a story that nobody wants to say.
There's a reason no one wants to say it.
Because if you say it, you're that person who said that.
And you can never take it back.
So I'm going to say it as carefully as possible.
I'll just take my chances with it, right?
I'll start by saying there's no way that I will ever know and you will ever know what happened with Kavanaugh and Ford or if anything happened.
We'll never know if anything happened or if something happened what happened.
But we have to take her accusations seriously, so we'll start with that.
It seems to me that the way the information is trickling in about how she's dealing with the accusation, when she did what, what she's agreeing to do or not agreeing to do with the Senate investigation, Correct me if I'm wrong, and I think this is in large part her attorney's problem.
Here's how I figured out how to say this without getting in trouble.
I'm going to blame her attorney's.
You got that? So you have to get that part in order to get me off the hook.
We're blaming the attorneys for what I say now.
We're not going to blame the accuser.
Because, especially if she's a genuine victim, that would be the worst thing you could ever do.
But you can blame her attorneys.
All you want, right? They're professionals.
So it's fair to go after the attorneys.
That's where I'm going to make a stark line here.
Don't know anything about the accusers.
I don't know her. I don't know what she's thinking.
I don't know what she has done.
She's got a serious accusation.
We'll give her her respect.
But her handlers, her attorneys, and now I'm just going to say it, Have framed her as looking mentally unstable.
That's the thing nobody wants to say, right?
So her attorneys are the ones who really should be controlling how the information flows.
They should be the ones negotiating things that make sense.
And when you most recently heard that she had only agreed to testify if Kavanaugh went first, Whose idea do you think that was?
So we've heard that she's afraid of flying, which is totally normal, right?
Don't you know lots of people are afraid of flying?
And they're completely normal in every other way.
They just won't fly.
John Madden wouldn't fly.
I've got a good friend who has to be drunk to fly.
So being afraid of flying, totally normal.
But you start throwing things in there like that, like, well, she was in couples therapy.
Doesn't mean anything.
You know, everybody goes to couples therapy.
But then you throw in the, you know, doesn't like to fly.
Then you throw in the, why didn't she mention things before?
And then you throw in the, You want Kavanaugh, the accused, to go first, which doesn't make sense in anybody's world.
Unfortunately, it just sounds like something a crazy person told their lawyer, and the lawyer couldn't control them.
Again, a bright line here.
We don't know anything about what...
Christine Ford did or did not do.
We don't know anything about her internal thoughts, and I'm making no judgment on them.
That's very important. I'm making a judgment about her handlers and her lawyers.
Because they're the public face of the accuser.
So they're in charge of her reputation, the way she looks, the way she's being framed.
That's their job.
We haven't even heard from her, so she can't be doing it wrong.
We haven't even heard from her.
But her lawyers have painted a picture of her or allowed a picture to form in which...
Show me in your comments, have you had this thought that there's something not quite right and that mental illness has to be thrown into the option set?
Again, I'll say it as many times as I need to, I'm not saying that, and I'm not suggesting that we should have any kind of impression about the accuser.
I'm talking about the bad job that her lawyers are doing, because they're creating a public impression that doesn't look as...
It doesn't look as normal as the public wants it to be.
I'm not the first person to think this.
Let me tell you a story.
Many of you have heard this story before.
I have a Canadian stalker.
It's a woman who lives in Canada Every few years she comes off her meds.
I think that's what's happening.
And she goes public on my social media and has even called the people I work with.
She called the restaurants I owned and talked to the managers and she tells them this story.
So she tells it on social media and she actually calls and talks in person to people I know.
So the first thing you need to know is this is someone I've never met.
Complete stranger, somebody in Canada, and tells them that I've gone to her apartment in Canada, and I've rifled through it, broken into her home, that I've hacked her computer many times, I think, and that I've physically abused her and maybe her children, I can't remember, over years, and that there are lots of examples and details.
She tells the people I work with I had my restaurant manager call me and say, um, there's a woman here who says that you're a sexual abuser.
And I said, uh, who?
Now, um, and she would leave for a while on my blog, she would leave sometimes dozens and dozens of messages every day detailing all the detailing All of my crimes.
And again, I've never even met her.
She's just a crazy woman in Canada.
And I've gotten the police involved to try to get her family to get her back on her meds because it's a medical problem.
It's not a criminal problem.
Now for me, it's a big-ass problem, right?
Look at the size of the problem that caused for me.
Everybody I worked with, and by the way, almost everybody that she called was a female manager.
So at my syndication company, it was very female-dominated.
Most of the senior jobs were women.
So the women that I work with that I depend on, the high-level women that I work with, all got a phone call from someone who said I was a serial physical abuser.
Someone I never met.
Now this is a case of pure mental illness.
There's nothing else going on in this one.
And you've seen how many pictures are available of me, right?
It would be really hard to confuse me with just somebody else who showed up at your house.
I'm on video all over the place, etc.
Oh, by the way, she also thought I was sending her messages in all of my comics.
She thought all the Dilbert comics were messages to her and that they were abusive messages.
So, if you've never been in my situation, If you've never been the subject of actually imagined crimes, you probably don't think that's a thing.
Let me ask you, how many people thought that what I just described to you would even be possible?
That the human mind could imagine an entire life With me, a well-known face, somebody that is easy to Google, you know, you Googled my name, it's the first one that comes up, hundreds if not thousands of pictures of me, I'm kind of hard to misidentify.
You know what my voice sounds like, you've seen me, you know, in every possible way.
But she didn't misidentify me, and not just once, but over a course of years.
And that's...
What I'm trying to get to is the breadth of different human perceptions from pretty perceptive to pretty crazy.
It's really vast.
So, when I look at a situation like the Kavanaugh situation, I don't have the same experience and filter coming into it.
My experience and filter, especially as a hypnotist, especially as someone who's specifically studied false memories, someone who's written about false memories, someone who's looked into the Meg Martin preschool case, which was a whole false memory abuse situation,
My filter on it is that the possibility, I'm not saying this happened, I'm just saying the possibility that a 35-year-old accusation from someone whose lawyers, not the accuser, But whose lawyers and handlers are allowing her to be framed as not normal, whatever that means, right?
Not as we expect, let's say.
I don't like to say abnormal.
I'll say not the sort of typical responses we'd expect.
It raises lots of flags.
And again, I'll be as clear as possible, we don't know anything about the accused, and I have no reason to assume that she's anything but a normal, sincere woman.
Who believes her accusation and is trying to do the right thing.
So I want to say that again.
I have no reason to think that the accuser is anything but a good person who is trying to do the right thing as she sees it.
That's the assumption. So she's innocent until proven guilty just like everybody else, right?
So I'll give her the maximum benefit of the doubt.
And I wouldn't mind if the process got delayed a little bit to look into her claims.
I don't think that's unreasonable.
I think it's dangerous not to include at least the perspective that we don't know anything about her and that the range of who she could be is from totally legitimate to Canadian That's the human range of behavior and we don't know where she is on that spectrum.
So if your opinion is she's definitely here or definitely on the other side, those are not supportable opinions.
The only supportable opinion is that she's somewhere on the scale, and the scale goes from totally legitimate to batshit crazy.
If you don't accept that that's the range of human behavior, you have not had the kind of experience I've had.
Some people say you wouldn't mind the delay.
You know, the...
The system needs to set deadlines and if the Senate decides to go ahead and vote and they put them in, they can do that.
I wouldn't have the biggest problem in the world about it because the accusations, as I said yesterday, the accusations are not a legal question.
And in my opinion, because it was a 17 year old involved, the accused, that even if something happened, that's just not the same person anymore.
He's legally the same.
But there's no legal obligation here.
Nobody's suggesting there is one.
So if he doesn't make decisions the same way he would have when he was 17, and who does?
That's not even a thing.
We're really talking about a different person for all practical purposes.
So should 2018 Brett Kavanaugh pay for the sins of 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh who had a different brain and was in a different time?
Well, if he was 21 or if it was within the statute of limitations, absolutely yes.
If we knew for sure that these accusations were true, should you include it in your calculation about whether you support him for a Supreme Court?
Sure, you have that right.
You are completely entitled to prioritize that any way you want.
All right, that's enough for now.
How was this Periscope?
Give me some feedback. Yeah, I've heard some people say that women are even more skeptical than men about the accusers.
Tucker Carlson said this last night, you know, just to further the trouble he gets in.
Tucker's getting in a lot of trouble lately from the political correctness crowd.
What about murder, Scott?
Well, if somebody murdered somebody in a, well, it's dumb to answer hypotheticals, but it's easy to imagine that if the murder had been, let's say, a defensive one or in the heat of the moment or something, and 35 years later there was not a whiff of any kind of dangerous anything, You'd have to ask yourself how much that mattered.
So it's more about the 35 years of not exhibiting that behavior that is the important part on top of the fact that he was a different person then.
If he was a different person then but continued that behavior, well he's still kind of the same person then.
That's different. I think it is fascinating.
So is this your experience too?
I'll ask you the biased question.
Is it your personal experience that women trust women less than men trust women?
Is that a thing?
Thank you. Um...
Yeah, so what Tucker said was that...
Tucker indicated that it's obvious that women trust women less than men trust women.
Men actually trust women more than women trust women.
Yeah, it was a slight difference, but he thought it was an obvious difference in real life.
You know, in experience he thought it was an obvious difference.
And I'm asking you if you feel the same.
To me it's one of those situations where confirmation bias could easily be driving how you feel about that.
In my opinion, I would say that I trust men and women differently.
I'll bet you do the same too, right?
There are things I would trust a man about, and there are things I would not trust a man about.
But it's a different set of things and circumstances than I would trust a woman about or not trust a woman about.
So I think we may be getting fooled by the two domains, right?
If you're in a relationship, you're usually dealing with a woman who's in one kind of domain.
And if you're dealing with friends or co-workers, you're dealing with men who are in a different domain where the types of things you might lie about or might care about are different.
So I think it might be more of an illusion because of the domains.
Oh, Tucker says that a week delay will cause the Senate to withdraw the nomination.
Can't they just re-nominate it?
I don't know what the rules are, but it feels like that's the sort of thing they could work with.
But you know, the other thing they could do is just say, you got five days because the system requires it, and if in those five days we turn up something that makes us say, oh my god, we need more time, Then we'll decide then.
But let's take five days and find out if that's all we'll ever know.
If after five days that's all you'll ever know, then you just go ahead with the vote.
If after five days you find something new and it matters, you can make the decision then whether to wait or go ahead.
So I would definitely do the research as much as possible in the time that you have.
So let me give you an example about when you trust women more than men.
Let's say you're going to get together with a friend, and the friend could be a man or it could be a woman.
And your friend says at the last minute, oh, I got a headache, I'm not feeling good, I'm kind of tired, could we not get together?
It's sort of like an hour before you were supposed to get together and you've made all your plans.
If a man says that, That he's not feeling good and can't get together?
Are you more or less likely to believe it than if a woman says it?
That's the domain question.
So that would be an example of sort of a social lie, that you would more likely, I think most of you would be biased and you say, oh, that sounds more like a woman thing.
So that's my point, is that the trustworthiness of men and women, I think, is distorted in our minds by the fact that men and women do socialize in different contexts, in different ways, in different situations, and And regular lies in different situations as well.
Alright, I think we've said enough.
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