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Sept. 25, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
22:49
Episode 234 Scott Adams: Kavanaugh and Iran
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams, and you're going to have coffee with me.
Or you might have a different beverage, or you might have no beverage, or you might have something to eat.
But, no matter what it is, you can lift it to your lips and join me.
For the simultaneous sip.
Here it comes.
I was looking at a comment on Twitter yesterday that said my voice is crazy.
But I didn't know if that was good or bad.
And it can put you to sleep.
Do I have a voice that will put you to sleep?
ASMR? So if you've looked at the news today, you will know there's something very interesting about the news.
There's no news.
That's it. When was the last time you had news without any news?
If you look at the headline pages of CNN or Fox News, It's retread stuff about Kavanaugh, somebody's opinion about Kavanaugh, somebody's making a good point about Kavanaugh, but it's all sort of stuff you've already heard.
News just stopped.
Now what does that tell you about news?
What can we learn from this?
Well, does it seem to you that just when Just when the Kavanaugh thing started becoming important, does it seem to you that it could be likely that all the other news in the world stopped for two weeks?
That would be weird, wouldn't it?
But that's what it looks like.
So what can explain that?
Is it because we are the simulation?
Well, that's probably not the cause in this case.
Here's my opinion.
I think what you're seeing is confirmation, if I can call it that, not in the scientific sense, but confirmation that the news is manufactured.
Now here's why you know that.
Because if we had room for more news, in other words, if Kavanaugh were not totally dominating the headlines, there would be other news.
Did that other news go away?
Just for a couple weeks or today?
Probably not. But the point is...
That those things we think are natural news that just seems to happen in exactly one page of headlines quantity per day.
You know, roughly speaking, some days a little more, some days a little less.
But basically we have about a web page of headlines every day.
And that just stopped.
I think what that tells you is that it's manufactured all the time.
And that if we didn't manufacture news, there would be lots of dead news days, like today.
But today you don't notice because it's filled with old Kavanaugh.
So here's my current thinking of this.
Ask me if this is not the way it's shaping up.
On one side of the Kavanaugh question, we have people who say that women should be believed in their accusations, and that just the fact that the accusations are credible should be enough.
It's not a legal process, so we're not trying to put anybody in jail.
But people are saying the accusations alone are enough credibility to change how people should vote on this Kavanaugh situation.
So that's one side. The other side says we can't start a precedent.
We have to use the right process.
People are innocent until proven guilty.
You know, we can't take forever tracking everything down if it's not a legal process, etc.
So one side is saying, let's obey the process.
Let's obey the system.
The system matters, the process.
The other side says that what's important is the woman's, let's say the accusation, the woman's word over the man.
So one side says, let's put what the women say as more important than the man's life, because Kavanaugh's entire life will be destroyed if this doesn't work out for him.
So that's one view, and the other view says, follow the system.
Have I framed that correctly?
Do you think that that's accurate?
That one side says, let's follow the system, and the other side says, let's get this specific result.
Now, I've made that claim about the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or difference between the right and the left more generally, that the right says we can't decide what is fair all the time.
It's just too hard.
Nobody can figure out what's fair in every given situation.
But we can have a common set of rules that look like the Constitution, that look like the law, that look like maybe the Bible, if you want to take it that far.
But if you're working off the same rulebook, you know, the same Ten Commandments, the same Constitution, etc., you can't make sure every outcome is optimized, but you can make sure you have a credible civilization.
Because people will say, I don't like how this one turned out or that one turned out.
But the way we got there, the system, I do respect.
I respect the Constitution, even though I don't like that particular outcome.
So that's a Republican way.
Now what I like about that is if you respect the system, you're probably going to get a good, stable civilization.
With lots of bumps, but it's a, you know, life is messy.
If you don't respect the system and you try to pick winners, who's the winner?
Will it be Kavanaugh?
Will he be the winner?
Or will it be the accuser?
Will they be the winner?
Can we kick him off the, you know, derail him from the process by making up some stuff that's not typically part of the process?
You know, can we subvert the process?
So one of them is sort of goal-oriented.
Our goal is to keep him off the court.
Forget about the system.
The system is irrelevant.
Let's keep this guy off the court.
That's a goal. A goal is to preserve Roe v.
Wade. That's a goal.
And Republicans are saying, let's have a system that works.
Now, in a way, one of the things that this shows you Is the low value of men.
And this is not new.
I mean, what I'm going to say is sort of the current situation and maybe the perpetual situation.
From a biological perspective, men are way less important than women.
For the obvious reason that a woman is necessary to have a child.
Having children and reproducing is the key, most important element of survival of a species.
So it's the basic, most important thing.
So women are biologically more important because you could have one man impregnating lots of women if you had to.
But legally...
Legally, we try to say that everybody's equal.
This is one of those situations where it's very clear that women are more important.
Now, that doesn't mean that the outcome will go one way or the other, but what I said to you is the framing about the woman's accusation versus the stability of a system.
What I didn't say It's a value of a woman, the woman's accusation, versus a man's reputation or personality or life.
It's not really even about women versus men, because men are so unimportant biologically.
This is not an opinion, I'm just saying biologically, and we kind of act this way.
Men are so unimportant that we don't even say it's men against women.
In this case, we've said it's women, their credibility, their ability to be safe, their ability to make an accusation and be heard.
That's being put up against sort of the generic system.
We're talking about stuff like precedence and things like that.
Men aren't really even part of the conversation.
They're not terribly important to this.
Now, I'm not going to even argue that that should change.
If it sounds like I'm saying that situation should change, I don't know that it should, because biologically men are less important than women.
There's no way to change that.
Now, that doesn't mean every man is less important than every woman, right?
It just means in sort of a general way, biologically.
Yeah, so it's typical for men to sacrifice for women.
I don't know.
I'm sure that women would say the same thing.
It's typical for women to sacrifice for men.
That may be more of a point of view sort of thing.
Yeah, I'm not saying...
You can get rid of all men.
I'm just saying that the value of an individual woman is greater, biologically, than the value of an individual man.
And we're seeing this play out in the way this situation is framed.
Alright, so everybody who is playing Captain Obvious.
So Captain Obvious, I'm talking to you, Captain Obvious.
I do understand that men are necessary to create babies.
I'm not saying that I'm valuing men less.
I'm saying society does, and biologically.
You could have one man impregnating lots of women, but you can't have one woman, you know, the reverse, whatever.
Okay. I'll stop talking about that.
Let's talk about Iran. So I guess the president is going to do a speech in front of the UN today, and Iran is on the docket.
So how do you think that's going to go?
How do you think the Iran speech will go?
Keep in mind that the president has been out of the news for a long time.
At least as much as the president can be out of the news.
Have you noticed that the All the excitement in the news is really not about President Trump anymore.
He got sidelined for about a week.
So one force at play is that the president hasn't made much news lately.
So he may want to make a little news.
On the other hand, We've seen his playbook for how he handled North Korea, and it looks like he's using a similar approach, and it's probably the smart one, at least from my perspective.
It seems that he's doing the, what would you call it, the boot and the fig leaf method.
So he's basically being as hard-ass as you could possibly be on Iran, short of actually attacking.
At the same time, he said today in his tweet that he's not going to meet with President Rouhani of Iran, but he thinks he'd like to someday, and he thinks he's probably a lovely man.
A lovely man!
Now, if you're in Iran and you see that the president of Iran was just called the lovely man, there's probably some cultural problem with interpreting that.
Don't you think that there's a lot of head scratching going on?
You know, they're over in Iran and they're saying, what did the devil say about us?
The great Satan has tweeted, oh, the great Satan says of our president, he's a lovely man.
Sarcasm? Sarcasm? Does anybody know if this is sarcasm?
Anybody? Anybody?
Does anybody know what American sarcasm looks like?
Did we get insulted?
Because I can't tell if he insulted us.
Did we get insulted? Can anybody?
Nobody knows? Seriously?
Nobody can tell what this tweet means?
Who can we ask?
We better watch some periscopes.
Find out what that Scott Adams guy says.
Well, the ambiguity of it It was, I hate to say delicious, but I had some kind of an artistic feel to it.
I don't know how to exactly describe how I felt when I saw that, when he said that Rouhani is probably a lovely man.
Because it was so intentionally ambiguous And yeah, I think productive.
It wasn't actually, it wasn't a throwaway line.
It was actually the only productive part of the tweet.
You know, because we probably already told him we're not going to meet with him.
So the productive part was that he says, I think he's a lovely man.
I think that was, to me it was like art.
You know, this is why people, I think historians will say that the president is the best tweeter of all time.
So what it does is it opens up the possibility that he's not just a big old evil devil, talking about the president, but that he's someone who's just trying to find a way through.
So at the same time he's being a total hard ass, he's also saying, but you're probably a lovely man.
Love to meet with you under the right circumstances.
It's great because it leaves them a path that isn't the hard path.
Now, I've not heard about Iran playing hard with the United States since the Iran nuclear deal was scuttled.
Have you heard any situation where Iran has done something that really mattered?
They've probably poked around the edges a little bit.
But has Iran done anything that was specifically heinous in the last month or two?
Maybe we wouldn't know about it.
It could be stuff that's happening on the ground and funding Hamas and stuff like that.
So... So I don't know what they've been doing, but it does seem like they've been acting like they're looking for a deal.
Now apparently the next part of the sanctions against Iran are going to kick in early November, I think.
And when they kick in, it's the oil restrictions.
The oil restrictions could completely destroy the country.
Because I say that based on the fact that their economy is sort of teetering and the populace is very unhappy, at least in pockets of Iran.
And that could be enough.
I'm not the expert on the Iranian economy, but if they're really close to the edge and if the oil restrictions are really a big deal to the economy, maybe that's enough.
And so Iran is going to be looking for a way out.
Now, does Iran have a military way out?
Probably not.
Does Iran have a way to forever beat the sanctions in a way that they could thrive?
Maybe in the old days.
My suspicion is that we're really good at this sanctions business.
And that we can turn off pipelines and we can stop big tankers and we could probably stop enough trade that Iran would become a permanent fourth world country over time.
They would just decrease and their economy would shrink forever.
Their economy just might keep shrinking with no stop.
So, I've said before that we may be approaching a post-war civilization.
That doesn't mean every war will be avoided.
There will always be flare-ups.
But if you look at North Korea and you look at Iran, what is it that will probably get us our best results there?
In both cases, it's probably economics.
Because as the world gets more technological, It becomes harder to beat the sanctions.
Somebody needs to fact check me on that.
So I just made a claim that as soon as I said it, I wasn't positive it's true, but it makes sense to me.
So here's my claim. That as technology improves, as our satellites are better, as our communication is better, our ability to spy is better, that the ability of a country like Iran or North Korea to break sanctions It might be lower and lower every year.
So there should be some crossover where the value of sanctions gets stronger and stronger because we're a more connected world.
There's more technology watching everything.
We can track things better, etc.
So our ability to stop war with economics is probably improving You know, quite a bit.
Meanwhile, the value or the utility of a fighting war, where you actually have two militaries lining up and fighting, the utility of that went from pretty good in the old days, you know, Genghis Khan, that was a pretty good deal.
Because if you had the good military, you could win.
And if you had the weak military, well, you had to do what you could do.
But you couldn't avoid fighting.
If the big one attacked you, you kind of had to fight back.
So in the old days, there was utility.
You could potentially win the war.
That was the thing.
You could win the war.
Today, I'm not even sure that's possible.
If you look at even Syria, you could say that something happened, but it wasn't much of a win.
Everybody lost.
So I think we're reaching a point where wars are a way for both sides to lose.
But an economic embargo is a way for everybody except the offending country to win.
Because everybody else will do fine.
In fact, they'll trade with each other more because you're out of the loop now.
So I think we may be heading toward a time where economics is the weapon of choice.
If this president gets a good result in both North Korea and with Iran, and of course there are big ifs, gigantic ifs, galaxy-sized ifs involved in this, But if he gets good results, it will be because of the economic pressure on top of the military pressure.
You still need the military pressure.
You still need a credible threat.
I think that's still necessary.
But the actual fighting is going to be economic, I think.
And we may be at a crossroads of history in which this president, being sort of business-minded, is the first one to realize that the economic weapon is a complete kill shot if you're willing to use it aggressively. is the first one to realize that the economic weapon If you turn your screen sideways, the chats will line up in a different place that might work better for you.
You can also turn off the chats if you don't want to listen to it, if you don't want to see the comments go by.
I think you push the little icon of a person in the bottom right of your screen, and somewhere in the settings it will give you a choice of turning off the comments if you don't like them.
Was economics his weapon when he bombed Syria?
I think the Syrian conflict I'm going to mark as the last of the military ones.
So my point is not that there won't be military action because obviously that's going to last a while.
But Syria is a perfect example of where it didn't work.
You know, ISIS didn't get what they wanted and nobody else did either.
They just got a destroyed country with too much immigration.
So Syria might be the example that kicks off the new world because even Syria didn't work.
Look at the fact that that war, because it was a traditional war, it attracted how many different nations to be fighting in that little piece of dirt that nobody wanted.
It's a perfect example of why you shouldn't have any more wars.
UN countries will still be buying Iranian oil.
Some will.
But it seems to me that that will constrict over time.
All right.
I don't have a thing else to say because there's no news.
Thursday will be interesting.
I still don't know if the Christine Ford thing will be televised.
Do we know that?
Probably not. Anyway, that's all for now.
I got a good work. I'll talk to you later.
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