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Feb. 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
42:03
Episode 418 Scott Adams: The Three Pillars of TDS
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Hey everybody!
I see there are people joining right now.
I hope you're running to get your beverage.
I'm a little late. I overslept.
I barely know what's going on.
If you'd like to see me when I've just woken, I've just awakened, I've just waked up, awoken, I've just awoken or wakened, I've done one of those things.
I'm really tired. Is what I'm saying.
But I'm not so tired that I cannot enjoy the simultaneous sip with you indescribably sexy and smart people.
So please grab your cup, your mug, your chalice, your stein, your thermos if you will, your glass, your container of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good.
I always look tired, somebody says.
Probably right. Alright, now I've been...
I've been arguing with people on Twitter, which is, I suppose, the same as being on Twitter, arguing with people on Twitter, over the Charlottesville hoax.
And I wanted to put some stuff in context here.
Now the Charlottesville hoax, the hoax part of it is that the very fine people comment referred to white supremacists.
So that's the hoax part, because obviously he was talking about, obvious to you, but not to the rest of the world apparently.
It's obvious that when he said there were fine people on both sides, he meant both sides of the Confederate statue issue, not Antifa versus white supremacists.
But, together, there are three things which form the Trump derangement syndrome support structure.
So, it's not that these are the only things that people think about President Trump, but I would say these are the three strong pillars, and they're all starting to fall apart.
So if you think about it, there was the Charlottesville hoax, which is really the, I would say, the proxy for people's belief that the president is a big ol' racist.
Now, they have lots of what they think are sort of coincidences or things that happened 30 years ago or, you know, so they have lots of confirmation bias-y, you know, reasons, but there's really one reason That is the...
I would say it's the leader of all the reasons.
And that's the belief, which is a hoax, that...
It was a hoax, and it was the belief that the president actually called the white supremacists fine people.
Now, this one is very strong, and I'm going to get back to it in a minute, but let me just talk about the others.
There's the Russia collusion.
Which looks like it's going to fall apart in the next month or so.
So let's say that Mueller comes out with his report.
And let's say that he finds that this just doesn't exist.
Well, let's see. I don't want to ruin it yet.
I don't want to draw on it yet.
I don't want to ruin my picture yet.
But you get the idea.
So the Russia collusion pillar is likely to just disappear.
The other pillar is that he's crazy and impulsive and uninformed and any other kind of mental 25th Amendment reason.
Put them all in there. But every day that he's president and nothing breaks, You get farther and farther from believing that this is reasonable.
So for example, what about the time he refused to disavow David Duke?
He didn't.
That's another hoax.
There is no time that he didn't disavow David Duke.
That just never happened.
There was a time when he said he couldn't hear the question and he wasn't sure how to answer because he said he didn't hear the question.
Now, I don't know if he didn't hear the question or not, but it's pretty clear that if you ask somebody who's running for president, do you support the KKK? Whoever it is who said...
That they think he might be racist because he didn't disavow David Duke.
First of all, he did.
Many times. So the first thing you have to say is that the fact is incorrect.
He disavowed him many times.
In public. You're talking about this one time Jake Tapper was talking to him and he hesitated on the answer before being unequivocable later.
And somebody's saying, but I saw it.
I saw it with my own eyes.
Yes, but let me ask you which of these two versions of reality sound reasonable.
One, there was something about the question that he was either thinking of a way to answer it differently or he didn't hear it, but for some reason he was momentarily confused about how to answer it.
Or, let's compare that to the other hypothesis.
The other hypothesis is that for a moment he considered backing the Ku Klux Klan on CNN in public while running for president.
Can you really tell me that you think that is maybe something that he was considering?
Because to do that you really have to assume he's crazy too, right?
Because that wouldn't be a dog whistle.
That would be...
the craziest thing that ever happened so if you believe that the craziest thing that could ever happen actually happened and that you actually saw it that is tedious because the craziest thing didn't happen there was something about the way he answered maybe the way he heard the question maybe he was thinking of something else Maybe he momentarily didn't connect the name David Duke.
Who knows? Whatever it was.
But what it wasn't, I'll tell you the...
So he says, don't fall for it, Scott.
The least likely thing it was, of all the things it could have been, if you had a list of a thousand reasons, the least likely thing is that he was planning to back the Ku Klux Klan on CNN while running for president.
You have to ask yourself, What are the odds that he was considering doing that?
That would be the craziest interpretation.
That's hard to defend.
So here's the thing.
As days go by, we find out that he's not been determined medically crazy.
None of our allies are failing to work with us.
Our allies are not failing to work with us.
They seem to be working with us fine.
It looks like the China negotiations are progressing.
It looks like North Korea is going fine.
It looks like the economy is good.
Even if you want to say, okay, that was Obama's economy.
Trump didn't break it.
He didn't break it.
So every day that goes by, this pillar gets weaker because he's just not doing the things that people assumed would happen if he were mentally crazy.
Yeah, now let's get back to this.
As somebody recently said, David Duke recently came out in favor of Representative Omar.
Does that make Representative Omar a supporter of the KKK? It doesn't work that way.
Because it turns out that people can like things for different reasons.
And that that's the most normal situation in the world.
You might like coffee because it wakes you up.
I might like coffee because of the taste.
So therefore, maybe I would have more decaf than you because I like coffee because it tastes good and you don't like the taste, but you like the fact that it wakes you up.
The single most...
The single most...
Perhaps the most common situation in the universe is that people like things for different reasons.
So does it make sense that a standard Republican could like President Trump for lowering taxes and for being good for border security?
At the same time, David Duke could see an opportunity to use it for recruiting because he sees that CNN has brainwashed half of the world into thinking that this president is somehow in favor of the KKK, right?
So David Duke being smart says, hey, I think I'm going to act like I'm going to go with this.
This might be good for recruiting or something.
I don't know if he's doing any recruiting, but in terms of supporting his side, It was smart for him to embrace the hoax because it's good for recruiting.
Now that's a completely different reason than what other people find in the president.
So people can like a president for completely different reasons.
That would not be unusual.
That would be the most common thing in the world.
Some people Some people want tighter border security because of crime and whatever else, and other people want tighter border security on the southern border because they don't like brown people.
Those are completely different reasons, but they can still like the same thing for different reasons.
Anyway, the Charlottesville hoax is sort of the most important pillar It needs to come down.
Because this one's falling away by itself.
And the Russia collusion thing looks like it's going to fall away in the next month or two whenever Mueller comes out with his report.
And watch how maniacally people cling to this.
So I've been doing this experiment on Twitter where somebody will say, blah, blah, blah, big old racist Charlottesville.
And then I will say...
Here's the full quote where he explained that he was definitely not talking about the neo-Nazis.
It's right there in his own words.
Now here's the thing you have to ask yourself.
Would President Trump, if he said something provocative and offensive and something that he believed, would he stop saying it the next day because people complained?
Think about it. What are the odds that if President Trump said, you know, the moon is made of cheese, and then somebody calls him out on it, that the next day he's not going to say the moon is full of cheese?
Have you ever seen that?
He sticks with his original belief.
I can only think of one example, and that was when he was campaigning, and his first impression about abortion was that if a woman gets an illegal abortion, That the criminal justice system should punish her.
And then as soon as people said, no, that would make sense in every other crime, but abortion is different because the woman is just the victim and it's better if you just punish the doctor.
Now once you hear that, you can say to yourself, oh, if you've never heard that, It would be obvious to say, of course you should be punished for breaking the law.
But once you've heard that explanation, he said, oh, okay, I get that.
And then he changed his mind in 24 hours.
But that was a special case.
In general, no matter what he says, he's willing to say it again, wouldn't you say?
It's probably the most consistent thing about this president is that it doesn't matter if you don't like it, he's going to say it again.
If he said it once, he's going to say it again.
But the Charlottesville thing, when he said there are fine people on both sides, a reasonable person would say, oh, you mean both sides of the Confederate statue controversy?
Not both sides of Antifa fighting neo-Nazis.
That's not anything that anybody would say.
That's a ridiculous interpretation.
And when he was asked to clarify, sure enough, he said in the clearest possible language, heck no, I don't mean the neo-Nazis, they're completely disavowed.
So why would this be the one situation Where he was not willing to say what he had said before.
It's because it's a misinterpretation.
He was completely consistent that there were good people on both sides of the statue of controversy, and very consistent that that does not include any neo-Nazis.
Now keep in mind that his daughter is Jewish, his son-in-law and his grandchildren are Jewish, and here's the best part.
What are the odds that Israel would not have noticed if this president were a big anti-Semite?
Do you think that Netanyahu would not have noticed?
Do you think that they wouldn't have said something?
What about...
I don't believe I've ever seen one Jewish leader...
Let's say leader is somebody in Congress...
I don't know if I've ever seen one who believes that this president is an anti-Semite.
Have you seen that?
Why is it that the smartest people in the world at identifying anti-Semites, and I think you'd agree that would be Israel, right?
Israel would be really, really good at spotting anti-Semitic behavior.
I would say that they'd be excellent at it, had a lot of practice.
But they seem to have not noticed How do you explain it to yourself that Israel loves him, puts his picture on billboards, most popular president of all time, probably, most popular American president from Israel's point of view, probably the most popular. How do you explain that?
Israel didn't notice?
The only explanation that fits all of the facts Is the most common one.
The most ordinary explanation is the one that fits all the facts.
That nobody in their right mind would back neo-Nazis on television even if they believed it.
It's a ridiculous interpretation.
And it fits none of the facts.
Whereas the ordinary one fits all the facts.
That he wasn't talking about that.
He wasn't talking about neo-Nazis.
So I've been...
I've been trying to see what kind of a kill shot it would take, in terms of persuasion, to knock this pillar out.
And I've got to say, I haven't been able to find one.
But I want to see if there's anybody I can get, maybe on Periscope, to see if I can talk them out of it in real time.
So right now I don't have the guest option on.
But I'm thinking that I might do some demonstrations in which I invite some people in who are just really deep into Trump derangement syndrome and talk to them.
Now I already know what will happen.
But I want to model it for you.
So I can't do it today, but I'll do this.
This is what it would look like.
Once I've given my argument, I don't think there's any reasonable person who would cling to the Charlottesville hoax as true once it's been explained to them in front of other people.
So the other people part is actually kind of important here.
You'd want somebody to be listening, to have an audience, and then have me explain it.
And I don't think anybody can hold on to that view.
But what they would do, and this is very predictable, they would change it to, but what about David Duke?
But what about the thing he did 30 years ago?
Well, what about this and what about that?
And I think all of those can be debunked as easily.
But they would soon get to the point where what they were saying wouldn't make sense.
It would turn into word salad.
Have you ever seen me do this online?
Let me ask you this. A number of you watch my Twitter feed and you watch me interact with other people.
Have you seen me reduce people to word salad?
Have you ever seen me do that?
The word salad is where they start talking, but the words stop making sense.
They just seem to be sentences that make sense in some grammar way, but they're just nonsense.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments.
Yeah, so I had this. Anna Navarro was once again spreading the Charlottesville hoax as if true.
Now, the reason that the Charlottesville hoax is so important to the overall mental health of the country, let me say this as clearly as possible.
The mental health of the country is poor, wouldn't you say?
And if you're going to say, what's the downside of the Trump presidency?
I'd say, well, it's that.
It's not the one thing that could be better.
But there's definitely a mental health problem, and it has to do with people having a reaction to this president.
And that reaction is primarily because the press has created this whole hoax So if you could cure the Charlottesville hoax, it's such a big pillar, and the other pillars are coming down by themselves.
I think you could cure TDS if you could just get rid of the Charlottesville hoax.
And have you noticed how little pushback I get from this?
Let me ask you this. So even yesterday there was an article in the media.
This is one of those dogs that don't bark, you know, the dog you didn't hear situations.
You always look for the white space, the empty space, because there's a story in what doesn't happen as well as the story in what does.
So yesterday some publication called The Verge wrote an article about Carpe Dunctum and his meme.
That the president tweeted it.
So yesterday, the president tweeted Carpe Dunctum's meme, but it had some music in it from R.E.M., and R.E.M. complained, and then Twitter took it down for copyright violations.
Now, without getting into the details, REM was completely within their right to do that.
They didn't have to do it, but it's not unusual that somebody would do that because they don't want their music associated with a political party.
But here's the thing.
I tweeted it.
And I immediately became part of the national story, as did Mike Cernovich.
So Mike Cernovich and I were both listed in this story as, quote, far-right personalities.
So, first of all, neither Mike Cernovich nor I, I don't want to speak for Mike, but I think this is true, he would not describe himself as far-right, would he?
I don't think so. I'm pretty sure, right?
Mike Cernovich would not call himself far right.
I'm certainly not.
I'm the opposite of that. But my point is that even when I'm a little bit associated with a story, and I was only just slightly associated with that story.
I literally was just a guy who tweeted it.
I'm still part of a national story.
So here's my point.
If I make even a little bit of noise about a topic that's in the news, I become part of the news.
Will you accept that that's true?
You've seen this, right? Most of you have seen how many times my Periscope becomes part of the news, my tweet becomes part of the news.
I become part of the news very quickly because the news likes to bring in people you've heard of.
How many times have I cited in public the Charlottesville thing as a hoax and then described it as the very fine people part being clearly out of context?
How many times have you heard me say that?
A lot, right?
How many times have you seen the mainstream media report my opinion that Charlottesville is a hoax?
Zero. For three frickin' years, I've been saying loudly and on television that the Charlottesville thing was a hoax, and they don't report it.
Think about that.
Can you imagine me saying anything else that controversial and not making news?
I made news for a random connection to a tweet about a meme.
And that's normal. The normal thing is that I, you know, the news will throw me in the story for anything.
Now, I have said, you know, the Charlottesville hoax.
I think I may have said it in, it's been picked up, you know, maybe Breitbart mentioned it.
You know, I've said it on Fox and Friends.
I've said it myself, but it never got, you know, amplified after that.
But for the mainstream media, you know, the CNNs, etc., imagine if I said anything else in the news was a hoax.
Here's a mental experiment.
Suppose I went on and said, it's a hoax that Mike Pence is a human being, or he's a robot.
Or I said, the tax plan is a hoax.
Or suppose I said the border was a hoax.
Can you imagine any other major, major story?
Charlottesville was as major a story as you could get.
I am saying loudly and often, in public, That one of the biggest stories of the country was a hoax.
And when I explain it, almost everybody goes, oh yeah, that was a hoax.
Even the people who don't want to believe it.
Because when you hear it, you realize that it is ridiculous Ridiculous to interpret what the president said that day as backing the neo-Nazis.
It's hard to hold on to that as even a slightly sensible thing.
But nobody reports how often and publicly I say that's a hoax.
Think about it. That tells you that there's something special going on with that one topic.
And watch, I'm doing it again.
I can tell you for sure that every major media outlet follows this periscope.
They all follow it.
Nobody's going to pick this up.
There's no chance that MSNBC is going to run a hit piece on me saying, oh, this idiot says the Charlottesville thing was a hoax.
And if they do, here's the second part of my prediction.
Because I'm kind of challenging it right now, there is a chance that it will happen now.
But when they write it, it will be a hit piece in which they lie about what I'm saying.
In other words, they'll change what I'm saying about Charlottesville hoax being limited to the very fine people part, and they'll say, cartoonist says it's a hoax that neo-Nazis were violent in Charlottesville.
So watch this.
If they write about it, They'll change my opinion to something, I don't know, pro-Nazi or just wildly ridiculous.
They will not report.
Cartoonist says that the very fine people was referring to both sides of the statue question.
Can't report it because their entire reputations depend on that hoax staying intact.
And it's such a thin hoax, because you just have to hear the other interpretation, and it falls away.
By the way, if you have a second screen, here's a perfect example.
I just tweeted, so it would be the top tweet in my feed, and I'll show it to you on my phone, but you're not going to get the beauty and majesty of it.
You have to see it live. There's an optical illusion.
Let's see if I can make it big enough on my phone.
So this probably won't work, but you have to see it in the feed.
Alright. There's an optical illusion of some paper plates or plastic plates and cups that are all upside down.
So you see this? These are plastic plates that are all upside down.
And the illusion is that one of those plastic plates is actually not upside down.
And the moment you see the one that isn't upside down, and I'm not going to point to it, All of the other ones in your mind flip right side up.
Move to the right.
I think the comments are opposite on my screen as they show up to your screen, but I'm not sure.
It doesn't work when you're looking at it on my screen through your screen.
Go to my Twitter feed. It's the one at the top, I think, or next to the top.
And as soon as you see the one that's right side up, yeah, look at the comments.
Look at the comments of the people who just looked at it.
It's... Yeah, it's weird.
The moment you see it right side up, all of the other plates turn right side up.
And then you can turn it back upside again by putting it away and to take it.
The Charlottesville hoax is exactly that.
It's just like that illusion.
You just have to see the one cup turned right side up, and then the whole story changes right in front of you.
And you can actually feel it.
And you would feel...
That you've been living in an illusion for three years.
And it should, that feeling should activate massive cognitive dissonance.
It should make people who are pretty invested in their TDS, it should make them have a reaction that looks like nonsense to the observer.
So cognitive dissonance is when you realize That your worldview is wrong, but you don't want to change it because you're sort of invested in it.
So you try to make your world fit your ridiculous views once they've been outed as being ridiculous.
You don't leave them. You just say, well, there's a reason for my ridiculous view, and maybe it doesn't make sense to you, and then something crazy is described.
All right. So your explanation cured my TDS-infected cousin perfectly.
Well, there you go. So maybe you could try this at home and see if it works on anybody.
And what I would suggest is that people will go all whack-a-mole on you.
If you can get them to concentrate on just the Charlottesville hoax, And once you've convinced them that that wasn't real, they will immediately go to another hoax.
And they'll say, well, what about that time he wrote that article about the Central Park Five and said black people should be executed or something.
And then you say, but you know, that full page ad he took out about the Central Park Five didn't mention the Central Park Five.
It was about crime in general.
Didn't mention race.
Now, it was, of course, in the context of the Central Park Five, so people understood, and he wanted them to, that that was sort of a triggering factor, but he wasn't talking about them.
He made a general statement about violent crime should have the death penalty.
All right? So if you say that, then people say, all right, well, there was that one, but what about this?
Or what about that? And you can pretty much go down the line, but don't let them do that.
I would say don't let them go whack-a-mole on you.
I would say remove the Charlottesville hoax if you can.
And then just walk away.
Because you want that one to sink in.
You want somebody to believe, well, you want them to understand that the most central part of their belief about this president was not only a hoax, but a crazy one.
That you should actually feel embarrassed After somebody explains to you how taken you were.
And here's my challenge to the mainstream media.
I'm a well-known public figure saying in public that one of the biggest stories of the last three years is a hoax.
You're not going to report that, will you?
Because in order to report it, You're gonna have to take out one of the biggest pillars of TDS, and you're not gonna do that.
So watch how quiet things get, even though I've said the most outrageous thing you could possibly say, that a major news story was a hoax.
Watch for yourself.
Watch for yourself how ignored I am about that.
All right. Not going to significantly increase Trump's base no matter what.
Probably not. I'm not sure that we're in a world where anybody increases their base.
There are just so few people.
I'll tell you one thing to look out for for the 2020 election.
I've been watching as some smart people Have been saying, okay, Trump's base is staying with him, the people who would never vote for Trump are of course staying where they were, but what about those independents?
You've heard this, right?
The experts will say, yeah, but the independents are very anti-Trump right now, and you need the independents, and he needed them to get elected.
So the most important group, the only group that could be persuaded, they're persuaded against him right now, so 2020 doesn't look good.
Here's my prediction.
Independents Are playing a game in which they get to have their cake and eat it too.
Meaning that if you're an independent, you want to distance yourself from Trump's reputation by saying, I don't like Trump now.
Yeah, I don't like him.
Because you don't want to take any responsibility for anything you might do that you don't like or somebody else doesn't like.
But now it's 2020 and you walk into the voting booth.
And you've got a choice between somebody who's talking about socialist policies and a president who for four years has pretty much killed it on all the important stuff.
We might be looking at wrapping up five different wars.
You know the five, right?
If you count, just generally speaking, I'm talking about Yemen is starting to talk peace.
That's part of our influence.
You saw that North Korea is going well.
You see that Syria is winding down from a big problem to a smaller problem.
We're probably going to get out of Afghanistan, and pretty soon we're told that they will unveil a Middle East peace plan.
So that's, you know, the Palestinians, I assume, are the focus of that.
And Iran. So it's possible that at the end of four years, we'll have a president who's made progress or at least de-escalated five wars.
Five wars!
You probably will have an economy that's screaming.
And again, even if you say, well, you know, Obama gave him a good head start there, even if you want to say that, If you don't break it for four years, you're not dangerous, that's for sure.
And you might have a higher GDP than Obama had.
So you're going to see a lot of good news coming out of just the performance of the country.
He'll probably have something like some wall begun by then.
And I'll tell you what, even if he doesn't succeed with as much border security as he wanted, there's one thing you can definitely say about this president.
It does look like he's putting it all out there.
It does look like the president is doing everything that he can figure out how to do.
He's taking the risk.
He's taking the political risk.
He's pushing every button.
He's pushing every door.
He's turning over every rock in front of us.
So in my view, no matter what he does get done in border security, and I think you can safely say it'll be better than when he took office, whatever that looks like, People are going to say, well, we hired you to put in that hard work, and you did, and we watched why it didn't work, and it seems to be the other team.
You know, it seems to me that the other team is the reason it wasn't working.
So here's my bottom line.
When it comes to the election day, I think the independents who have been saying, I don't like that Trump.
I don't want to be associated with anything he does.
I think they're going to walk in and they're going to say, socialism?
That we don't know how to pay for.
Or four more years of really pretty good stuff happening.
And that four more years of pretty good stuff happening is going to be persuasive.
All right. Somebody says, immigration is everything if he doesn't fix it.
Well, we'll probably be in a situation by election day in which the president will have a supportable claim that he improved the immigration situation substantially.
Now, you might argue the details, you might say it's hyperbole, you might say, you know, some things are better, some things aren't, you know, so there will be always room for criticism.
But I think he's going to have a solid argument in favor of the proposition that he improved immigration border control.
Are you better now than four years ago?
I'm not. Are you?
Personally, I'm financially worse off, but that's because there's sort of a natural boycott that's built into saying anything about politics.
So I'm sort of naturally boycotted.
But, for those of you who are also in the boycotted category, I tell you again that my company, my startup that makes this app called Interface by WenHub, now you can sign up as an expert or any kind of celebrity or personality.
You don't have to be an expert.
And there's a donate button.
Let me show you. So every person who signs up gets a donate button and you can donate a dollar or any amount you want to them directly if you want to support their work and they've been deplatformed by other places.
All right. And so a number of people did sign up and sent me a dollar yesterday and more in a few cases.
And I really appreciate it.
I have to tell you that you probably know that I would probably do this with or without money because that's not my motivation right now.
But it does make a difference.
I gotta say that when I see even a dollar come through, I think, well, there's somebody who took their time To send me this dollar.
And the dollar didn't mean much to the person who sent it.
And it won't change my lifestyle.
But I gotta say that on some level, it feels good every single time.
And I appreciate it.
It's very encouraging and it's motivational.
And I appreciate it.
What if I'm a nobody? Can I sign up?
Yeah, anybody can sign up to be an expert on anything.
Or you can just sign up to be a celebrity and you can have a donate button.
I'll publish a way to link to it in the next few days and that'll make it easier.
You can put it on your webpage and stuff.
All right. Have papers stopped carrying Dilbert because of your support for Trump?
Not that I'm aware of.
There are a few thousand newspapers, and I don't always get informed.
If the smaller ones are dropping me or adding me, I don't hear about that.
But I haven't noticed.
So if it happened, it would have been a one-off here or there, but I haven't noticed.
The newspaper industry is unique.
And it's unique in that they can take the heat.
They're used to controversy.
So the newspaper industry would be the least likely to punish me for having a political belief.
That would be the antithesis of the newspaper business.
They're not that kind of people.
They're the kind of people who would like competing ideas.
Shiva cannabis scope.
Yeah, Dr.
Shiva is anti-cannabis, I believe, right?
I saw something in the news recently.
I don't think I would get in a medical discussion with a doctor.
That wouldn't be a good look.
And that's one of those cases where you'd need somebody, you'd need a pro and a con.
So I couldn't do that conversation without a pro and a con with me.
All right.
So, alright, I'm looking at your comments.
I think we've said it all. Watch how tomorrow there is no article in the mainstream press.
There might be something on the conservative press.
But there will be nothing in the mainstream press about me calling one of the biggest stories in the news a hoax.
Watch that. And if that doesn't tell you something...
Well, that's all I have to say.
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