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Nov. 24, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:08
Episode 314 Scott Adams: The New and Hilarious Climate Change Report, Schumer’s SCOTUS tweet
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Ah, good stuff.
So I told you that the news was going to start getting silly because we've reached the holiday season.
And the serious people who make serious news are not making much news.
There's no new legislation.
Probably won't see much happening internationally.
Things are going to slow down.
But the news still has to produce news.
So there's still news.
It's just that we'll get more excited about things that are less and less important.
But there are some really fascinating things happening.
And some of them are not reported.
That's why you have me.
And the first thing I will note...
Is that the complaints about the president being a big old racist sort of just sort of stopped.
And it happened about the time he was saying great things about a number of African American leaders.
It's about the same time he was doing prison reform and promoting it.
And about the same time the economy was doing great, etc.
So that's a change. It's a pretty big change.
But did you all see CNN's reporting about the big climate change news?
It's funny to call this news.
So this is CNN's headline.
Climate change will shrink U.S. economy and kill thousands, government report warns.
So it's a government report, so that's the best stuff, right?
So the fact that it comes from the government, and they made a big deal about, or somebody did, about the fact it was released during the holiday so that people wouldn't notice that it said that the environment was going to kill people.
But once you dig into it a little bit, it turns out that, like many things, you can't really tell the difference Between good news and bad news.
So let me tell you what the headline here is in terms of the bottom line.
It says, a new U.S. government report delivers a dire warning.
So now CNN is calling this a dire warning.
So a dire warning would mean that what follows that description should be something that's bad for the world.
So let's see if what follows dire warning There's something bad for the world.
It says about climate change and its devastating impacts.
So the impacts are going to be devastating and it's dire.
It says the economy could lose hundreds of billions of dollars.
Wow! That's a lot of money.
It's dire. It's devastating.
It's hundreds of billions of dollars we could lose.
It's bad stuff. Let's keep going.
Or in the worst case scenario, oh my God, it's worse.
Here it comes. Here's the worst case scenario.
It could lose more than 10% of its GDP. Good Lord, 10% of the GDP, that's like a depression.
Or at least a recession.
By the end of the century.
Wait, what?
By the end of the century?
That's a little over 80 years.
Wait, so in 80 years, we might lose 10% of the GDP. Do you know what the GDP will do in 80 years?
Do you know how many times it will double?
About seven times.
So by the end of the century, the GDP, let's say it increases at 3.5% a year.
The GDP will roughly go up by 700%.
So if we do nothing about climate change over 80 years, we'll lose 10% of that 700% gain.
Or something like that.
I don't know where they take the 10% exactly.
Do they start taking it from the beginning or the end?
But let's say you invested heavily in climate, and let's say it took your GDP from 3.5% a year down to 3% a year, because you're spending all your money on stuff to clean up the environment.
What would that do to the GDP? Well, it would be down a lot more than 3.5%.
So you have this interesting situation where Where CNN, because they are largely financially illiterate and science illiterate, like the rest of the world.
So when I say that CNN is financially illiterate and science illiterate, I don't mean they're worse than anybody else.
I mean they're exactly average.
If you're a journalist, you're not a scientist, and you're not a finance person in all likelihood.
I suppose some people cross over.
But for the most part, You're not really the right person to report on this sort of stuff.
Now, I read this news, and to me, this is the best news I've ever seen.
Now, let me be as clear as possible that this is not hyperbole what I say next.
For the world, so not talking about me personally, but for the world...
I think this is the best news I've ever heard.
Because I wasn't around when World War II ended.
That would have been maybe the best news.
And everything else sort of just trickles along and gets better over time a little bit.
But I've never heard better news than that the worst case scenario for the climate is that it would only take 10% off the GDP by the end of the century in 80 years if we do nothing.
Am I wrong that that's the best news that the civilization has ever heard?
Assuming it's right. Now, what are the odds that a projection over 80 years is correct?
Zero. Now, some people have said, no, no, Scott, you don't understand what this projection is for.
The projection is not telling you what it will actually be.
The projection is telling you what it could be if nothing changes.
What are the odds that nothing important will change in 80 years?
Zero. Zero!
There are very few things you can say are zero chance, but the odds of nothing important changing in 80 years?
Well that, my friends, is zero.
So it could be much worse.
It could be the end of the world, because something could change that would be very bad.
Maybe. But far more likely, there will be technological change.
Is it likely that in, say, 40 years, China will still be polluting at the same rate?
It's possible.
But I think the technology will be a lot better and they're not going to want to choke themselves and have to live underground or live in a bubble or something because they're pretty polluted over there.
So it seems that the normal march of technology would get you to a point where people are We're driving electric cars and ride-sharing and telecommuting more.
Everything is greener and better and we found 10 new sources of energy.
In 80 years, the odds of fusion being implemented economically are really high.
Now, if you said, what are the odds in 10 years?
I'd say, 10 years, that's probably a toss-up.
20 years, starting to look like fusion might be, you know, you might have a fusion reactor.
But in 40 years, you're going to have fusion reactors, seems to me.
Not 100%. But more likely than not.
You've seen that there are a number of technologies.
I think I've seen half a dozen technologies for directly dealing with CO2. Meaning that there are scrubbers that will suck it out of the air.
There are ways to sequester it and trap it.
There's an idea about putting an aerosol in the air that cools off the planet.
Which sounds scary to all of us, I know.
I'm not sure that one will ever be used.
But the other thing that we don't seem to count is how good we are at remediating against danger.
Take for example the severity of hurricanes.
Let's say for example that climate continues to warm and we don't even have to talk about why.
Doesn't matter if it's humans, doesn't matter if it's natural.
Let's say the climate continues to warm.
One of the things that we have a pretty good idea would happen is that the hurricanes would be bigger and more frequent, perhaps.
And if you didn't know this, and please fact check me if anybody knows more than I do about this topic, that would be easy to do.
One of the reasons that the hurricanes develop the way they do in the Atlantic, anyway, is because the Sahara Desert is so hot.
So the Sahara Desert is really hot.
That creates some high temperature zones, I guess.
And that gets the hurricanes going.
So there's a reason that there's a hurricane season.
It's because Africa is heating up.
Now we also have the technology to reforest deserts.
So apparently we already know how to reforest things.
And one of the ways is you just put animals there.
If you put the right kind of animals there, apparently they poop on the land and over time it actually fairly quickly you can reforest a desert area.
Now, I don't know if you can reforest the entire Sahara, but I'll bet there's a lot of stuff you could do if you wanted to just remediate the hurricanes.
So there's probably stuff you could do to change the temperature in just that one place that would make the hurricanes softer.
Now look at the number of people who die in major catastrophes these days.
I sat on a periscope recently that I think in the last hundred years there was a major flood in China So it's a hundred years ago.
Technology is bad.
There's no communication. And the flood killed between one and four million people.
It killed so many people that they can't even narrow down to between one and four million in China.
Now when we have a major disaster here, what is the death toll?
Well, the worst one I think recently was Puerto Rico, right?
And that was 2000.
Now what will happen after Puerto Rico gets rebuilt?
What will be the risk of the next hurricane to Puerto Rico?
Well, it could still be bad, but whatever they build is likely to be a little more hurricane-proof.
So every time we have any kind of a disaster, we get smarter and better and more protected against the next one.
Take the fires we just had in my state, in California.
80 some people died, a few hundred are missing.
But what is the result of that?
We have a pretty good idea of how to make sure that the risk of that is lessened.
Because of the disaster, we learned a bunch.
Unfortunately, we learned it the hardest way you can learn something.
But we now have a better idea about how to protect the forest.
There's more energy about doing it.
People will certainly have a better system for getting out of town.
So you should expect that people have a buddy system, that elderly will not be abandoned to the fire, as apparently was the case here.
So it is the normal way of civilization that we figure stuff out.
We figure out how to remediate.
We figure out how to harden against earthquakes.
We figure out how to build things that don't fall apart.
We figure out how to communicate better so we can get out of trouble.
We figure out how to probably...
Probably in 80 years, we'll figure out how to reduce hurricanes by changing the temperature on the land that's causing the hurricanes to form.
So if you're looking at an 80-year projection, economic projection, how do you factor in how good we will become at just avoiding death and destruction?
Take a look at the impact on the coasts.
So there's some thought that a lot of the economic loss would be real estate near the coast because the sea level will rise.
How do you have that conversation without talking about how good it will be for reducing the income inequality?
Can you think of anything that would reduce income inequality faster than a rising ocean?
Because who has the nice real estate on the ocean?
It's not the poor people.
Poor people don't really have beach houses.
Poor people did not build a skyscraper in Manhattan.
Poor people do not own Al Gore's beach house.
So if all of the real estate on the coast gets threatened, they're going to have to rebuild, remediate, build walls, you know, tear it down, build another house inland.
Who does all of that work?
Who would do all the work of moving people from the coast where they're getting destroyed by higher water, if that happens?
We don't even know for sure if that'll happen, but if it did, the low-income people are gonna get jobs.
There's gonna be a lot of activity.
Who's gonna pay for that construction?
Not poor people.
It's going to be rich people.
It's going to be corporations.
It's going to be maybe the government, but again, they'll be taxing the people who have money.
They won't be taxing the people who don't have money.
So how do you figure that into your economic projections?
You don't. How do you figure the technological solutions into your forecast over 80 years?
You don't, because you don't know what they'll be.
So when CNN reports that this is a catastrophe and it's dire, I'm looking at the same number and I'm saying, are you kidding me?
We're only going to lose 10% of our GDP over 80 years during a time when, if things went normally, it would go up by 700%?
Because remember, 3.5% compounds pretty quickly.
If you go up 3.5% per year...
You're really growing. So, somebody says that's false.
Rich people pay less in taxes.
You must watch too much CNN if you think rich people pay less in taxes.
That is very not true.
In fact, only the people who have money pay taxes.
I hate to tell you, but the people who don't have money Actually don't pay taxes.
Yeah, most of the taxes are paid by the top 10%, right?
1% pay 40% of the taxes, and probably the top 10% pay 90% of the taxes, I'd say.
Federal taxes, anyway.
State taxes is another situation.
Okay, so...
That's the funny thing. So the funny thing is that we can't tell the difference between good news and bad news.
This dire report about the climate, to my mind, I'm looking at the same numbers that they presented.
I'm looking at their report, and I'm saying to myself, we're doing the right thing by pulling out of the Paris Accords.
To me, that's what their report tells me.
10% by the end of 80 years?
Now, they also say that thousands of people will die.
But remember, remember, they're not telling you that thousands of people will die.
That's not what they're doing.
They're saying that if nothing changed, thousands of people would die.
But everybody acknowledges things will change.
So, for example, to my earlier statements, if we never learned how to Help people who might die from the extra heat.
Well, then maybe thousands would die.
But that's not the case.
We will learn how to protect them.
We will learn how to harden against hurricanes.
We will learn how to predict them.
We will learn how to clean the forest so that they don't burn up as easily.
We will learn how to get people to air conditioning if they're just, maybe they're poor.
We will figure these things out.
So that thousands is likely to be just, you know, an imaginary number.
All right. Now the other funny thing, maybe the funniest thing you'll see in a long time, is the Chuck Schumer tweet.
So if you didn't see this, this is great.
So the background here is that President Trump had said that the Supreme Court was politicized, meaning that there were Obama-appointed judges that were likely to be Obama judges, meaning they would agree with stuff from the left, and that there were Bush judges who were more likely to vote right. and that there were Bush judges who were more likely So the president was saying that the Supreme Court is politicized.
Now, it is exactly what he said about Judge Curiel during the Trump, what was it called, the university?
Anyway, during that trial.
So what the president said is that the judge might be politicized by his association with his cultural heritage, It had nothing to do with his DNA. The president didn't say anything like Your DNA from Mexico makes you bad at your job.
Nothing like that.
He made a political comment, which was good politics, which is to say that somebody has an association with any kind of group, they're likely to be influenced by it.
In this case, Judge Curiel's association was with his entire family, which had Mexican heritage.
And since the president was the biggest critic of that community, Politically speaking, not racism, politically speaking, the judge's membership in that class of politically minded people might make him biased in a political way.
Now here's the fun part.
Just hold this in your mind, how much the president was criticized at the time for saying that a judge could be political.
Okay? To hold that thought, fast forward to the President, where the President is once again saying the same thing he said before, but he's now taking the argument to the Supreme Court.
Some of them are Obama appointees, likely to vote the left.
Some are Bush appointees and Trump appointees, likely to vote right.
Judge Roberts pushes back by saying, there are no such things as Obama judges and Bush judges.
We are just judges.
We are judges who just use the evidence to reach decisions.
Here's where it gets interesting.
Chuck Schumer jumps in with this tweet.
He's talking about Judge Roberts' response to President Trump's tweets.
So Schumer says about those people talking, he says, I don't agree very often with Chief Justice Roberts, especially his partisan decisions, which seem highly political on Citizens United, Janice and Shelby.
So Schumer is starting out his tweet by saying that Chief Justice Roberts makes partisan decisions.
So far, that's exactly what Trump said about Judge Curiel, politically biased.
It's exactly the same thing he's saying about the Supreme Court.
So now, Schumer has just agreed completely with what Trump tweeted.
Keep in mind, Schumer's tweet is a criticism of the president, in which he starts it by agreeing with him 100%.
That Roberts is politicized and not judging.
And then he goes on to say, but I am thankful today that he, meaning Judge Roberts, almost alone among Republicans, stood up...
First of all, he's calling Judge Roberts a Republican.
So he's calling the Supreme Court justice a Republican while arguing that they're not political.
He says, almost alone among Republicans, stood up to President Trump and for an independent judiciary.
Oh my freaking God!
It's the dumbest tweet anybody's ever sent.
And of course, a number of people.
I'm not the one who noticed this, right?
So the political class is all over him.
For agreeing with President Trump harder than anybody ever agreed with him while acting like he wasn't.
Now, I don't even know what to make of that.
I don't even know how to interpret that.
If I interpret it through the persuasion filter, you know, my go-to filter for the world, it would indicate that Schumer actually doesn't know he did this.
Meaning that he wrote it with no awareness whatsoever that he had contradicted himself as violently as you can contradict yourself in a tweet that was just a few characters long.
I believe he doesn't know.
Now those of you who are saying he has low IQ, that he's senile, almost certainly that's not the problem.
Because say what you will about, you know, your adversary is on the other side, blah blah blah, they're all dumb.
Remember they're saying that about your side, blah blah blah, they're all dumb.
It's never true. Well, it might be true sometimes, but it would be the rarest thing for somebody to achieve what Chuck Schumer has achieved and to be actually low IQ. That would be pretty unusual.
So I have no reason to believe that Chuck Schumer is anything but a really smart guy who succeeded through his talents and hard work.
Now, that doesn't mean I agree with him on issues or anything.
I'm just saying that he's almost certainly a fully functional adult with lots of experience, lots of brains, lots of street smarts, lots of political smarts, and all that.
And yet he did this.
How do we explain it?
There is only one filter that explains this.
Cognitive dissonance.
I don't know that there's any other way to explain it.
Yeah, Trump derangement syndrome is kind of the same thing.
So, I believe that he actually is, I like to use this phrase, cognitively blind.
In other words, his mindset has rendered him In a sense, blind to the obvious, because it doesn't agree with his preconceived idea.
His preconceived idea is that the president is wrong, and if he's criticizing the Supreme Court, oh my God, it's the end of the world.
Remember, we keep saying that the president is criticizing the Supreme Court.
It's all bad. So he had to stick with that, but he also couldn't agree with the guy who disagrees with him on rulings, which is Roberts.
So he was holding two thoughts that he held as solidly true.
The trouble was, they were opposites.
So he may have been actually cognitively blind and his brain just turned one of them into something else so they fit together.
Most likely. So I'm not a mind reader.
We can never know for sure.
There's no test you can do to find out.
But if you compare my...
My description of what is likely to have happened, a cognitive blindness caused by Trump derangement syndrome essentially, compare that to he's just so dumb that he can't tell the difference.
I think the hypothesis that he's so dumb or senile that he can't tell the difference is very weak.
Again, can't rule it out.
He may have gone crazy over the weekend and I haven't heard about it, right?
He may have been drinking. You know, so it's possible it was something else.
But cognitive dissonance is so common.
That you have to, if you're playing the odds, you say, oh, it's a cognitive blindness caused by cognitive dissonance.
That's by far the most likely, I'd say it's a 60 to 80% likely explanation, whereas all of the other explanations put together are maybe 20%, 40% at most.
All right, um... And let me put a cap on this discussion by saying this.
You know how we always talk about the three branches of government?
You've got the judiciary, you've got the presidency, and then you've got the Congress.
And we're all happy about the fact that, oh, we've got these three branches, so they have some balance and checks and balance.
There's nothing like that.
There are not three branches.
There are not three branches of government.
It was designed that way.
It was designed with the intention that there would be three chambers, somebody say.
It was designed with the intention that there would be three components or chambers or components.
But the reality, which I think Chuck Schumer agreed with, is that the Supreme Court is really just a captive of the presidency now.
Now, it's not one-to-one, you know, whoever's president owns the Supreme Court.
But because the appointees don't do judging anymore, let me say that as clearly as possible.
The Supreme Court is not in the business of Of making legal and constitutional rulings.
It was designed to do that, but I don't know when it stopped, but it doesn't do that now.
All it does is you just count up the number of conservatives, you count up the number of liberals, and you say, okay, who has more?
Right now there are more conservatives.
How hard would it be to predict which way they're going to vote?
Not really hard at all.
They're going to surprise you once in a while, but not really.
And if you're talking about something that happened in the past, I would say it's not really relevant because we're far more partisan today than maybe ever.
So I don't think it's fair to speak of the Supreme Court as a separate branch of government.
Because it really isn't. It's a wholly owned subsidiary of the party that nominated them.
They're really a party apparatus more than a judging group.
I saw a list of how many rulings were overturned by the Supreme Court based on which circuit court they came from.
Apparently the ninth is in the top four For getting overturned.
But, apparently the ninth is not the most overturned.
I guess it's the fourth out of four for getting overturned.
It's like 80-some percent of the time it gets overturned.
Now, if you see that percentage and you say to yourself, my God, 80% of the rulings that the Supreme Court takes, they overturn something from the lower court, the ninth.
But, isn't that misleading?
I don't know a lot about the court system, so somebody fact-check me on this.
But doesn't the court only take cases they think they have a really high chance of overturning?
Isn't that true? And don't the most controversial decisions get funneled into those courts where they think they'll get the right decision?
So it seems to me that when you look at, oh, 80-some percent are overturned, there's a selection bias there.
The Supreme Court doesn't take every case.
They decide what they're going to rule on.
And I would imagine they look at all the things the 9th does and they say, all right, this one that's going to stay, that'll stay.
We're not going to change that one. We're not going to change that one.
Oh, here's one. This one, by its nature, is something that we think might change.
That's what makes it a Supreme Court case, that it maybe could go either way.
So I think there's a selection bias in there, isn't there?
I'm not sure that...
So there are two selection biases.
One is that lawyers might take them to those...
Lawyers might bias where they take a case to a place where they think they'll get a friendly result.
And then also the Supreme Court is only picking the ones they think have a good chance of getting overruled.
Otherwise, why pick it? It doesn't try to correct every decision.
Yeah, okay. So I would plead ignorance on the finer details of how the core systems are working.
This is not an area that you should take my word for it.
But it seems to me that that number is probably greatly exaggerated just by the way things are selected.
I would not assume, if you're assuming that 80% of the Ninth Circuit stuff gets overturned by the Supreme Court means that the Ninth Circuit does a bad job 80-some percent of the time, I think that's completely wrong.
But somebody needs to correct me.
I think it's because it just looks that way because the things they select are the ones that are likely to get overturned.
Okay. What about the other circuits?
Well, in theory, they would get fewer controversial cases.
So the circuit courts that don't have things overturned never ruled on anything that was likely to be overturned.
That's my guess.
But again, I'm putting that out there as my very unreliable understanding of what's going on.
Somebody says I'm correct, but I'm sure there's somebody out there who's saying I'm incorrect.
It still means their underpinnings are weak.
It means that, but it doesn't mean that 80% of them are weak.
It only means that the few they decide to rule on are weak, and that's why they picked them.
So that 87% number strikes me as being completely misleading, but I could be wrong.
I'm directionally accurate, somebody says.
Alright, so let's put together some of the things that have happened recently.
We saw both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry in the last week say that Europe was mishandling its immigration and that Hillary's take on it was hilarious in a way.
So her take on it was that The problem with immigration in Europe is that it was sparking nationalism and racism and sort of creating conflict where it didn't need to be and therefore they were handling immigration wrong.
But that sounds a lot to my ears like you don't know how to handle immigration and it's ruining your country.
But nobody really does know how to handle immigration.
Do they? It's not like anybody knows the answer.
Because we keep acting like immigration is a yes-no problem.
Yes immigration or no immigration.
But it's never been a yes-no question.
It's always been a rate question.
If you said to me, let me give you a little thought experiment.
If you said to the citizens of the United States, hey, we're going to let in 100 million Sharia-loving Muslims, and we're going to do it in the next two years, what do you think, Americans?
Probably something like 85% of Americans would say, no, no, no, that's too many.
Now, some of them would be racist and some of them would not.
But pretty much everybody would say, that's too many.
It's too much of a shock to the system.
It's too much of different opinions coming in to try to mingle with our opinions and it's going to cause social unrest.
So that's if you said, we're going to bring in 100 million people into our country of 300 whatever million.
But suppose you said, I'd like to bring in one Muslim per year.
Just one. How many Americans would object to one well-vetted Muslim who believes in Sharia, but otherwise has a completely peaceful point of view?
One per year. What percentage of Americans would say, no way, no way, we can't let that person in.
Almost zero. You know, some people would disagree, right?
Because there's always somebody on the other side.
But when we pretend that it's about Muslim immigration or not, or Mexican immigration or not, it's never about that.
It's always about what is the rate that keeps your society whole?
What is it that Hillary was complaining about with European migration policy?
That the rate was high enough that it was causing social unrest.
It's the same frickin' point.
It's the same point as Trump.
So we actually saw the biggest, most I guess divisive, divisive issue in the country.
You just watch the biggest critic of the president, and John Kerry would be up on the top of the list, essentially agreeing with him, but they're agreeing with him over in Europe so that they don't have to specifically agree with him on exactly the same concept here.
So, as long as your leaders...
Are talking the dumb argument?
You should just ignore all of them.
It is equally dumb to say we should have open borders as it is to say we should let nobody in.
And it feels like both sides, even though they do lip service to some proper rate of immigration, it feels like we've characterized the two sides for the two stupidest positions.
The two stupid positions are no immigration and as much immigration as you want.
Those are both stupid.
And somewhere in the middle is the right amount that's good for the country and good for the immigrants as well.
Who really knows what that amount is?
We don't know what that amount is.
We do know that our systems don't support as much immigration as maybe many of us would like.
So Now, let's talk about China and their discrimination against the, I don't know how to pronounce the name of this ethnic minority group, U-I-G-H-E-R, or something like that.
But anyway, it's a small ethnic Muslim community.
Small in terms of...
Oh, it's Uyghur? Uyghurs.
Okay, thank you. The Uyghur community in China.
So apparently China is putting them in re-education camps and locking them up and doing horrible things to them.
Now, I'm going to try to discuss this without putting a judgment on it.
So, before I get taken out of context, because we know I will be, I'll say in the beginning, and then if I remember I'll say it at the end, I'm not putting a judgment or an opinion on it, I'm just going to try to describe it.
And it seems to me that China is treating the religion of Islam as a medical problem.
Now, I'm not saying it is a medical problem, and I'm not going to give you my opinion.
I'm just going to try to describe it and then contrast it because it's really interesting.
China is treating it like a medical problem, meaning that it needs quarantine and treatment.
So another medical problem like that would be an addiction, for example, somebody who is addicted to drugs.
You would quarantine them, keep them away from their sources of bad influences and bad drugs, and then you would treat them.
Now, what's different is that, you know, a belief in a particular religion, whether it's Islam or any other, is you could think of it like an idea virus.
Now again, I'm not going to say it's a bad virus.
That's for you to decide.
I'm just going to say that in terms of how it spreads, it spreads by human contact.
And once you get it, it's hard to get rid of it.
And what's different from Islam from other religions is that you can't leave.
You can leave, but you risk your life.
It's more dangerous in some places than others.
So, Christianity has an escape valve.
If you get into it and you don't like it, you can leave.
But you can also, as we've seen, you can modify it over the years.
It can become sort of whatever you want it to be.
People have all kinds of flavors of it, but mostly it's a peaceful, coexisting kind of an idea.
Islam has... A bit of a conquest mentality built into it, as well as you can't leave or we'll kill you.
And you can't marry somebody outside the faith.
So, and again, forgive me if I get any of the details wrong, but you'll get the general idea.
So that's different from other ideas.
So other ideas you can reject or accept, and you can say it in public, oh, I reject that idea or I accept it.
But with Islam, it's a different idea.
It's almost like a, I don't want to characterize it in any way that acts like an opinion, but it's sticky.
Meaning that once you have it, you're going to keep it, and your kids are going to have it too, in all likelihood.
So, you get all the details wrong, but tell me if I get anything wrong.
You can. So, of course there are moderate Muslims, and lots of them, but you don't need that many To be the kind who want to take over the world and spread their religion and etc.
Before it becomes a social conflict with the people who don't want that.
So I'm watching this and I'm thinking, you know, if you're going to judge it by our standard metrics of how we treat people in the West, you'd say, my God, China is treating the Uyghurs like a medical problem.
And we're deeply offended by that because our sense of religion is that one of our most basic ideas is freedom of religion, freedom of thought.
You can think whatever you think, go to the church you want.
It's very basic to the West.
But China's treating it like a medical problem.
Now suppose they didn't.
Suppose they encouraged it, let it grow.
Would it become a social problem in China?
Well, there's a 100% chance of that, right?
If the people who wanted a Muslim Sharia kind of a life grew to a large enough number, China would have to either accommodate them, or what?
Or what? If they didn't accommodate them, they're not going to change their mind, because that's the nature of the religion, right?
The Islamic folks in China are not going to say, oh, China doesn't like us to have this religion?
Oh, well, why didn't you tell me?
I'll just change my religion.
That's not going to happen. So you can't deport them, can't kill them, can't put them in concentration camps.
So China's making this cold calculation that we in the West would call evil, But they may be looking at it more as a system problem, like a machine that's broken.
And they're like, okay, we better take the pain now, because if we take it later, it'll be worse.
So they're discriminating in a way that we in the West would consider the worst thing that ever happened.
But they're also treating it like a medical problem, which is a very different approach.
We in the United States would...
We can almost certainly not do that, but we kind of are in a little way by limiting how many people can come into the country.
The fact that we don't allow and we would never allow 100 million people to come in with such a radically different view of how things should run Is because the idea is dangerous, like a virus.
But we don't think of it that way.
So, Scott, stop telling lies, somebody says.
What would be one lie or incorrect thing I've said?
You have plenty of characters.
Tell me what I've said that is not true.
I'm waiting. China persecutes Christianity and Flungang too.
Yeah, so they treat religion in general as a negative.
But I do think that they probably have a harder, and this is just speculation, probably a different opinion about some religions than others.
Alright, so some people are saying they agree with you.
And It's an interesting way to think of an idea.
And let me give you another thought experiment.
And when I do this, somebody's going to say, hey, did you just compare Islam to Nazism?
And the answer is no. I am not saying that Islam and Nazism are the same.
But I'm going to give you a thought experiment.
What if there was a country, let's say it's Elbonia, in which the Elbonians had decided to follow Hitler and become Nazis?
How many Elbonians is the right number to allow to immigrate?
And let's say that they have these obnoxious, these horrible views.
They're literally Nazis.
They dress like Nazis.
They'll tell you they're Nazis. They're not trying to hide it.
So there's no guessing about what they're thinking.
They're saying that it's Elbonia and half of them decided to be Nazis.
What would be our immigration policy?
Suppose that they were not committing any crimes in Albania and were not intending to commit any crimes here.
Would you keep them out of the country because of their belief system?
Because it's not compatible with their own.
But think about it. That's a serious question.
Would we let any Elbonians into the country if they were overt, racist, but they said, look, we don't act on it.
We'll take your oath to be good Americans.
We'll act like it's just our belief system.
You have different beliefs, but we'll follow the law.
We promise we'll follow the law, but we'll bring our belief system with us.
How many of them would we let into the country?
I don't know the answer to that, actually.
Because maybe some.
I don't know. But I suspect that we would draw the line there.
Now the trouble is, somebody says, were you born yesterday?
That's not really a comment.
Now the problem is that Islam is not one thing.
There's mostly people just trying to mind their own business and take care of themselves.
And there's some number that have bad intentions.
So you can't treat it as one big ball of the same thing.
And that's where it gets complicated.
But what percentage...
Let's say you knew Elbonians were 10%.
I'll just pick a number.
If you knew Elbonians were 10% actual Nazis, but you couldn't tell which ones they were, how many Elbonians would you let into the country?
If you knew that 1 in 10, in all likelihood, were just flat-out Nazis, but you couldn't tell which ones, I don't know.
Is 10% too much of a risk to let in any of them?
Because you wouldn't want to punish the nine that are binding their own business and have no bad intentions whatsoever.
So that's the practical kind of question one must ask when running a country.
I'm glad I don't have to make those decisions.
I'll say again, I am not, not, not comparing Islam or any other religion To Nazis.
That's not what I'm doing. It was just a thought experiment that if people were coming in with views that you thought would be destructive to your society, even if you're wrong, if you thought it was true, what do you do about it?
Are thoughts dangerous?
Are ideas dangerous the same way a virus is dangerous?
I would say they could spread the way a virus spreads.
They spread by contact.
And some of them are dangerous and some of them are not.
It's a lot like a virus.
You just have to decide who's the virus and who's the cure.
That's where we go wrong.
Because for everybody who says this is a virus, there's some people who say this is the cure, not the virus.
If you were in charge, what would you do?
I would change the question to how many, and I would turn it into a systems map in which I would say, the more different your worldview from the current worldview, the lower the rate should be.
And so I would make some general statements about, you know, if, let's say, what would be a good example?
I want to pick a country. What's a country where the people are not white, but they all speak English, and they, you know, they have a reasonable education system?
I don't know what that would be. Can you name a non-white country where the primary...
Oh, okay, yeah.
Yeah, India. I don't know what the percentage of English in India is, but of the educated class, it would be high.
Singapore, okay.
Good example. So I would say...
The rate that you would allow someone from Singapore or India into the country should be based on how different their ideas are from the ones that are already here.
And I would say if you're in India, your ability to...
What's the right word?
What's the word when you fit in with the culture to assimilate?
The average educated Indian immigrant assimilates in the United States really, really well.
So you would say it has nothing to do with their race, And it doesn't really have to do with the country per se, but the culture assimilates very well.
I've argued that Mexicans actually assimilate very well as well.
Now I know that some of you don't want to hear that, but for the average Mexican immigrant, or south of the border immigrant in general, once the second generation learns English, They're just Americans.
Yeah, Mexico is a one-hop assimilation.
The generation that goes to school here, they're just Americans.
The Indians who come over are sort of a zero-hop situation.
If they come over speaking English, they're pretty much Americans on, you know, Day one.
They're buying into the system before they get here.
They speak English. They've got an education.
They can get a job. You can't get closer to being an American than an Indian national immigrating to get a job.
Because, again, we're a country of immigrants.
So if somebody immigrates to this country, speaks English, buys into the Constitution and all of its beliefs...
That's pretty American, right from the jump.
And it has nothing to do with the color of your skin.
Vietnamese assimilate well too.
Good example. The Vietnamese who can speak English assimilate right away.
The ones who the children are the ones who were learning English originally.
Totally assimilated in a generation and a half, right?
It's not even a full generation.
Alright, that's enough for today.
I'm going to go do something else and I will say have a great day.
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