Feb. 1, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
20:29
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey, is anybody here? | |
| I know the sound is bad. | |
| I'm not using a microphone. | |
| I've tried three microphones in 24 hours. | |
| And three microphones in a row do not work. | |
| But sometimes they do. | |
| I don't know why yet. | |
| I'll work it out. Anyway. | |
| Let's talk about a few things in the news before I hit the road. | |
| But before we do, it's time to share the simultaneous sip, raise your cup, your mug, and join me for the simultaneous sip. | |
| All right. | |
| So you all saw the news that the mysterious phone call placed by Don Jr. | |
| to some blocked or... | |
| Unavailable, I guess you'd call it the block number. | |
| Turned out to be not a call to the president, not a call to his father. | |
| And so, one of the biggest pillars of the fake Russia collusion story... | |
| Is that that phone call happened and blah, blah, blah. | |
| So we're watching little by little as the Russia collusion illusion starts evaporating. | |
| And it's just one little thing at a time. | |
| And this is one more thing that evaporated. | |
| Now, I would like to test my predictive powers. | |
| I'm going to make a claim I'm better at spotting fake news than the average person, and that there's technique to it. | |
| Now, obviously, I got taken in by the Covington fake video, so there's no such thing as a 100% accurate ability to identify fake news. | |
| But, yesterday, I think I lost about 1,000 Twitter users in the last 24 hours, because it turns out that if you say, hey, I think the video you're watching is unclear, what people hear when you say the video you're watching may not be as clear as you think it is, they hear, I'm in favor of killing babies. | |
| Now, I wish I were kidding about that. | |
| But I'm not in favor of killing babies, but I'm very much in favor of clearly understanding what the issue is. | |
| And when the video of the Virginia governor first came out, social media's interpretation, now I'm just talking about social media, their media interpretation, was that A live baby could be born healthy, and that if the woman thought that she would be mentally distressed by being a mother, she could kill the baby. | |
| Now, it's no laughing matter except that literally nobody contemplated that, right? | |
| Nobody thought that was actually a plan. | |
| It was not in the bill. | |
| Here's having now read the language, and by the way, I'll bet at least three quarters of you still think this is real news, at least the part I'm talking about. | |
| Now, the part that is real news is that the law... | |
| Involved late-term abortions, and most of you don't like late-term abortions. | |
| I don't know who does, but I'm not arguing abortion here. | |
| So nothing that comes out of my mouth is an opinion on abortion, okay? | |
| I'm just talking about whether we perceived... | |
| Was somebody said correctly? | |
| So when you look at the actual language of the bill, somebody finally sent that to me, it seemed obvious that none of the people talking about it had ever read it. | |
| So it looked obvious to me that the author of the bill had not read it. | |
| I'm not sure that the governor had read it. | |
| None of us had read it. | |
| The news hadn't read it. | |
| So maybe somebody had read it. | |
| But it looks like at least part of the problem is that the people involved hadn't even read it. | |
| So it would have been hard for them to clarify something that they didn't know. | |
| But here's the part that the news is still getting wrong. | |
| At least on Fox News, it looks like they're still reporting this backwards. | |
| And that is that the law contemplated that the so-called mental problems of the mother are not... | |
| Are not just simple distress or, gosh, I'm upset, or I'm going to be anxious or something because I have a baby. | |
| It was nothing like that. | |
| That was all fake news. | |
| What the bill talked about is if the mother had a high risk of either dying from the pregnancy, if the pregnancy went its term and delivered, the mother would have a high chance of dying, or Or having mental damage, like actually being brain damaged. | |
| Now apparently there must be some situations in which a mother can be brain damaged by something going wrong with the pregnancy. | |
| Now, I'm no doctor, but the point is that The fake news was that the baby could be born alive, and then the mother could say that for her mental health, it's okay to kill the baby. | |
| That was never the law. | |
| That was not the proposed law. | |
| And that's still being reported, I think, as something like true. | |
| Now, those of you who are screaming, but it's late-term abortions. | |
| You're just on the wrong topic. | |
| Nobody's talking about the abortion law yet. | |
| Nothing I've said is pro or against abortion or any particular abortion law. | |
| I'm only talking about whether we saw the information correctly. | |
| And then you can make your own decisions on the morality of it. | |
| But I would like to claim that as a complete victory. | |
| Because from moment one, I said to myself, no, there is no chance that What they're talking about is a lie of healthy baby being born and then the mother can kill it because she doesn't feel good about it. | |
| That was never true. | |
| No matter who said what, no matter how garbled the message, no matter how poorly written the bill was, that was never the case that anybody contemplated that as a law. | |
| So, let's talk about the... | |
| The border security conversation. | |
| Now, as many people have pointed out, I've been saying forever that the only way we'll know that something Smart and useful is going to come out of the working group that's talking about the budget for the border. | |
| The only way we're going to get a credible, useful solution is if you're already hearing about the experts being interviewed and you're seeing some pictures of the various plans. | |
| But we're seeing nothing like that. | |
| Which means they're not even trying. | |
| Which means it's just a political process. | |
| So if it's a political process, then I think the president has cleverly allowed the government to prove that it can't function. | |
| So what is being proven while we watch is that we don't have a functioning government, largely because of the media. | |
| The media has so polarized the teams that everything is a win for one side or a loss for the other that nobody can get past that. | |
| Nobody can actually talk about the details of border security in a productive way because we can't get past winning and losing. | |
| And that's primarily the media, is who keeps people in their camps. | |
| So I would say that the government no longer functions in its normal way because the media has changed so much that it can't let the government function. | |
| The media is no longer a watchdog. | |
| So the media is now a divider as opposed to a watchdog. | |
| And that's the problem. | |
| Now, under those... | |
| Scott doesn't want to discuss killing babies. | |
| Here, let me block you for that. | |
| So those of you who are trying to drag me into a fight on abortion, my opinion is that my opinion should not influence anything on abortion. | |
| So my opinion is that you should ignore my opinion. | |
| I'm going to stick with that, okay? | |
| So my mic was not working fine earlier. | |
| I played it back and it was a hot mess. | |
| So I did check that, of course. | |
| All right. What was I talking about? | |
| Oh, so the president has now created a situation in which he can declare an emergency because the government doesn't work. | |
| It will look like he did his best to give everybody a legitimate chance to do it through normal mechanisms, and it just won't happen. | |
| Now, here's what a good solution would look like. | |
| And here's what I would call good work by this team. | |
| Let's say the working team, it's got some Democrats, it's got some Republicans. | |
| Let's say they can't agree. | |
| I'm okay with the Democrats and the Republicans not agreeing, so long as, and here's the key, and here's what to look for, so long as they both produce an easy-to-read Plan that is their preferred plan. | |
| In other words, if they don't agree on a plan, I won't be delighted, but I will be happy if they both can provide a plan that's the Democrat plan, maybe it's more sensors and electronic stuff, whatever it is, the Democrat plan and then the Republican plan, and show it to the public. | |
| Because the public is now engaged. | |
| We need to see the plan. | |
| Let us look at the Democrat plan. | |
| Let us expose it to the sunlight. | |
| It might be better. | |
| I might be the only person involved in this conversation right now who says there's entirely a chance I don't know what the odds are, but there's a very good chance that the Democrat plan will be better in terms of better use of the money, bang for the buck. | |
| How would I know? Let's see that plan. | |
| Let's talk to the experts. | |
| Let's get them on TV. Let's the experts say what's the weak parts, the strong parts. | |
| Let's compare the budgets. | |
| Let's let the public see it. | |
| Anything short of that is just BS. If what comes out of this is a bunch of words and no agreement, then we can't say that they tried. | |
| That would not look like trying. | |
| Trying would look like, hey, we got an agreement we could all live with, we all gave up something. | |
| That would look like trying. | |
| And the other thing that would look like trying is, we can't get together, but here are our two plans. | |
| One Democrat plan, one Republican. | |
| Hey public, let's see what the public thinks about this. | |
| Let's invite the experts in to comment. | |
| If we get to that, I would say that the president need not declare an emergency. | |
| Because that would still look like a productive process, just a little unusual because it calls the public in to look at it directly. | |
| But if we don't see that, if the only thing that comes out of it is we can't agree, it doesn't look like we'll agree, and we've produced absolutely nothing for the public to look at even. | |
| If at the end of this you don't have a picture, With a breakdown of the budget? | |
| If you don't have that, nothing happened. | |
| And in that case, the government is broken because of the media. | |
| And I think the president would be on safe ground to declare it an emergency. | |
| And of course, everybody will argue, is it technically an emergency? | |
| Is it technically a crisis? | |
| Here's the answer to that. | |
| It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. | |
| We have a problem, and the government... | |
| Apparently is not the right mechanism for fixing it. | |
| You know, the normal mechanism of Congress, we tried, it didn't work. | |
| Not only did it not work, which is what I imagine is going to come out of this, not only will we know it didn't work, but they won't even do the next best thing, which is to at least show us two different plans and say, we tried, this is why we think our plan is better, we're not going to back off. That would be okay. | |
| That would be That would be a work product that I could respect even if I don't agree with it. | |
| Yeah, and of course the news and the pundits will be all twisted up about the definition of words. | |
| Let's talk about the word emergency. | |
| Let's talk about the word crisis. | |
| Let's talk about the word humanitarian and crisis. | |
| Talking about the words doesn't change anything, but that's all you're going to see on the news is because it's easy to talk about the definition of words. | |
| It's hard to make anything happen. | |
| So the president has the strongest hand he's had so far. | |
| Unless, right now I think the only chance that the Democrats have of prevailing is to produce a plan that we can look at that looks pretty good. | |
| Because they might. You may have seen that President Trump said that Kamala Harris looks like the strongest competitor right now. | |
| And I think he's right. | |
| But she did do a clever trick in which she's trying to bring up the criminalization. | |
| I guess she wants the federal government to pass a law to make it a hate crime to lynch Now, most of you are going to say the same thing I'm saying, which is, are you telling me it wasn't already a hate crime to lynch? | |
| What the hell? Didn't all of us believe that was already a hate crime? | |
| I mean, if that's not a hate crime, what the heck is a hate crime? | |
| If that's not a hate crime, what does hate crime even mean? | |
| So I'm a little confused about why it needs to be a law and why it's not already a law, I guess is the better way to say it. | |
| But it was a beautiful trap, because since the Republicans are spring-loaded to disagree with Kamala Harris, no matter what she says, she says, why don't we make it a hate crime if there's a lynching? | |
| How do you get on the other side of that? | |
| How can you argue... | |
| That there's any other side than saying lynching, of course, is a hate crime. | |
| We should treat it that way. | |
| So it's a brilliant trap because it's forcing a lot of people to act as though that's not important or to argue the technicalities of it. | |
| If you're arguing the technicalities of lynching, you are losing. | |
| Never get in an argument about the legal technicality of lynching. | |
| It's like, well, yeah, of course, nobody likes lynching, but maybe in this specific situation, no. | |
| No. Do not do that. | |
| Don't parse anything. | |
| Don't finely trim anything. | |
| Do not get in that conversation. | |
| The only correct answer to that is... | |
| Well, lynching's a hate crime, period. | |
| And if the law needs to adjust for that, why not? | |
| All right. It's a ham-handed tactic. | |
| Yes, it's a clever, clever ham-handed tactic, but ham-handed just the same. | |
| Now, Kamala is a lawyer. | |
| Somebody prompted me. | |
| Hillary Clinton was a lawyer. | |
| I have to think that the easiest type of person to be would be a lawyer for this president, because I think he matches up well against lawyers. | |
| Lawyers are going to be a little dry and technical, and that doesn't sell as well as whatever the heck President Trump does, which tends to sell pretty well, at least to his base. | |
| So here, see, most of you are falling into the trap even now. | |
| So I'm seeing in the comments people saying stuff like, wait a minute, I thought lynching was already murder. | |
| Any conversation you have like that sounds a little like you didn't quite completely agree with the fact that lynching is a hate crime. | |
| Don't argue the details. | |
| I'm warning you, do not argue the details. | |
| Don't argue the meaning of words. | |
| It just makes you fall into the trap. | |
| So Spartacus has announced, and if there were not a woman of color... | |
| In this race, then I would say Spartacus would be a strong contender. | |
| Because if you saw the list, I tweeted this out, CNN had a list of all the moderate Democrats. | |
| And by coincidence, all of the moderate Democrats were old white guys. | |
| I think there were eight or nine of them on their list. | |
| They were all old white guys that they labeled moderate. | |
| And I'm thinking, well, is that the new word for old white guy? | |
| Moderate? But none of the old white guys are really viable, to use the abortion word. | |
| They're not really viable as candidates for president for the Democrats because they have too much diversity there that needs to be serviced in one way or the other. | |
| So Kamala is at least twice as nominatable As Cory Booker, and he is nominatable. | |
| He's got the resume. | |
| He's a black man in America at a time when that's an advantage politically. | |
| But she's got twice as much good stuff as he has because she's a woman and she's a woman of color. | |
| And I don't think the Democrats really, on an average, can see past that You know, the surface stuff far enough to deal even with policies. | |
| Biden doesn't have a chance. | |
| You know what would have been the best way for Cory Booker to announce? | |
| Yes. | |
| He just should have said, I am Spartacus and just go with it. | |
| Maybe not. I don't know. | |
| But it feels like he should own it instead of let it own him. | |
| I think I would have fun with that if I were him. | |
| And don't become Pocahontas. | |
| The trouble with Pocahontas is she fought the nickname the whole time. | |
| That just makes it stickier. | |
| I think you could just embrace it, and it's funny, and just go with it, and maybe that would work. | |
| But you can't get elected. | |
| I don't think you can get elected as long as Kamal is in the race. | |
| So, I think that's all I got. |
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