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March 23, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:55
Episode 463 Scott Adams: Sheepinions, Hallucinations, Fake News, Traitors, Conflaters
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
I don't know if there has been such a fun day since November 9th, 2016.
It's just one of those days that's so delicious.
This is no joke.
I woke up at 3.30 this morning, and I was so excited to experience today that I couldn't get back to sleep.
So I've been working since about 4 this morning, which isn't that unusual for me.
However, I wanted to be here right on time to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
So if you're prepared, you have your cup, your mug, possibly your chalice, your stein, maybe a thermos, a tankard perhaps, and you've filled it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee, you are ready to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
Ah, so we've got lots to talk about.
I'd like to start out with what I call the Slaughter Index.
The Slaughter Index.
I introduced this on another periscope, and if you haven't heard it yet, the idea is this.
Instead of a poll for how the 22 presidential election will go, I use the Slaughter Index.
And it will be a moving scale, and it will move depending what kind of news is happening between now and Election Day.
And the idea is that it's a straight-line prediction that says if all the variables stay the same, Here's what it will look like in terms of President Trump slaughtering whoever he's running against.
As of today, the slaughter index is pinned at 100%, meaning if nothing changed and all the things we know today just keep going, the economy stays strong, ISIS stays defeated, North Korea doesn't test another nuke, if just everything just went the same way it is now, 100% chance of slaughter.
The president would win in a major landslide.
Now, keep in mind...
That there's no way that the variables stay the same.
So it really doesn't mean anything in terms of an actual prediction, because there will be so much that happens between now and 2020.
But it's kind of interesting every now and then to pause and say, what if everything just stayed the same?
What would that look like?
Now, I would think that the president's best argument is to simply rank all the things that people care about and say, are they better or worse?
The economy, better.
Military strength, stronger.
Let's use stronger as our word.
The economy, stronger.
Employment, stronger.
Military, stronger.
Homeland security, probably stronger.
National borders, probably stronger.
Not nearly as much as his supporters want, but stronger.
Let's see what else we have.
Healthcare. Do you imagine that more people have health care or fewer?
Well, if the economy is stronger, I haven't really seen reporting on this, but my guess is there are more people with health care.
Stronger. Somebody said debt.
If he's running for re-election, he probably doesn't want to mention the debt, but you're right, the debt is worse.
How about relations with our allies?
Not bad. How about trade negotiations?
Stronger. So, there are a lot of things that he can argue are stronger.
One of the question marks I have is environment.
Now, the critics of President Trump say, and quite reasonably they say, that the administration is getting rid of some regulations that will hurt the economy.
And when I read that stuff, I say that the Trump administration is reducing some environmental regulations.
Now, when I see that, it sets off an alarm, right?
The last thing you want is more pollution.
Boy, I never see in those stories the counterpoint.
When I see a story like that, I see that the administration got rid of a regulation that was intended to protect the environment.
That sounds pretty bad.
What the story never includes is why they're getting rid of the regulation.
Because probably it didn't work.
Or didn't make a difference, or the difference it made wasn't worth whatever the cost was.
So I would say that's a question mark.
I would like to see accurate reporting that maybe measured somehow the water quality and the air quality and just see if it's better or worse than it was, you know, four years ago once we get to 2020.
All right. The president is having an amazing week.
Which may not be reported that way, because people don't report good news for this president.
But here are the things I love.
If you follow the saga of the fine people hoax, in which I and Joel Pollack and now a number of other people...
Have tried to correct the permanent record on the fact that it was widely reported, but it wasn't true, that the president once called the racists who were literally marching with tiki torches in Charlottesville, they imagined he called him, that the president called them fine people.
That didn't happen. He specifically excluded them from the fine people comment without any prompting.
He was very clear that he was not talking about them, but it was reported the opposite, that he was talking about them.
And it became this huge false memory that became the linchpin for, you know, that's the wrong word.
It became the foundation for all of the other false beliefs about him, and I'm going to talk about those in a minute.
But in the context of us trying to straighten that out, Trump announces that we're going to recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel, which was disputed territory that Syria had claimed.
But there is no real Syria anymore.
So the United States, Trump apparently, just said, all right, we're just going to recognize that as Israeli territory.
Now, In fact, it was de facto Israeli territory, but people are going to complain as they are and say you can't give territory to people that they won in a war.
Like, you just can't make that precedent.
It's a pretty good point. It's a pretty good point.
But it also emphasizes that this president is pretty pro-Jewish.
He's pretty pro-Israel.
He moved the embassy.
Which nobody thought he would do.
And now he just said, all right, Golan Heights, we're going to treat it like it belongs to Israel.
Which nobody saw coming.
Nobody saw that coming.
So the beauty of it is that it worked so far against the idea that he once...
He complimented the people who were in Charlottesville with anti-Israeli slogans.
How do you hold that in your mind, that fake news, with the real news that he moved the embassy to Jerusalem and he just declared the Golan Heights part of Israel?
Those are extraordinarily pro-Israel moves.
Now some people said, hey, you know, isn't that bad for any kind of a comprehensive peace deal over there because you're taking sides with Israel in such a way that you're no longer a credible broker of peace.
Here's the genius of Trump.
Moving the embassy was free.
Meaning that he could just take it off the table, because if they did a comprehensive peace plan and he had not settled that issue, it would still sort of be in play.
So he just took that variable and he just said, okay, that's no longer on the table, but take as long as you want to come to the peace table.
And then nobody comes to the peace table.
Time goes by, and he says, okay, the Golan Heights would have been a subject of a comprehensive peace agreement, but now it's not.
Takes it off the table.
The President had been giving aid to the Palestinians.
I don't know the details of this, so I might get a fact wrong here.
But I believe he stopped it because the Palestinians were rewarding terrorists.
And it didn't make any difference.
He took it off the table.
So little by little, the President is taking variables out of the equation.
They're just no longer subject to debate.
And if you are the Palestinians and you're watching the arc of history, you're seeing Israel get bigger.
You're seeing Israel get stronger.
You're seeing your own side just becoming discredited, losing support in the Arab world.
And at this point, should they wait?
So I've talked to you about how our psychology is far more influenced by the direction of things than where things are.
Where things are can be bad, but if the direction is good, people are happy.
It's like, hey, we're moving in the right direction.
So... If you look at Israel as a static situation, it looks impossible to ever get to a better place.
If you look at it as a moving picture, you see Israel getting stronger and stronger without much effort.
They're just getting stronger and stronger without much effort.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians are losing support every day.
They're losing money. They're losing negotiating chips.
They're just going the wrong direction.
So Trump, I believe, understands the importance of direction.
And he's creating a situation where if they don't come to the table, they just keep losing forever.
If they do come to the table, which I think might be unlikely, they have a chance of at least stopping the loss.
So basically, instead of the Palestinians now have something to gain, The situation has completely changed to, they better hurry up, because every day that goes by, they have less.
And that's where they're going to freeze it if they ever negotiate for something like peace.
So, that part's interesting.
The president announced that he wasn't going to add some extra sanctions to North Korea.
And I guess he did it by a tweet and did not consult with people and said because it's based on his relationship with Kim and that he basically is being nice to Chairman Kim.
Now, how do we interpret that?
The smart way to interpret that is we don't really know what's going on.
So that's the smart interpretation.
Because we don't know what conversations are happening with North Korea or South Korea.
We don't know what's happening with China.
We just don't know the background of why he would do that.
But if I had to guess...
It seems that we have to give North Korea something in order for them to feel free to get back to the table and to be talking about something.
So if what the president gives them is a non-tightening of sanctions, and if North Korea doesn't test any more rockets or nukes, You're kind of creating a situation where maybe they can start talking again.
So my guess is that since he can always just reapply the sanctions anytime he wants, I mean, basically, the entire expense was a tweet.
So what the president gave up was 30 seconds doing this.
Tweet. That's what the United States gave up.
Because it's not like it's in our benefit to have sanctions on North Korea.
We just want them to cooperate.
We don't want sanctions.
We want cooperation. So for the price of a tweet, he can at least test if he gets any cooperation.
If he doesn't get cooperation, what did he risk?
He spent 30 seconds with his thumbs.
That's it. That was the whole...
the entire... The entire investment was 30 seconds of thumb work, and it might have solved a nuclear North Korea.
Now, not by itself, but the point is that it was probably a good risk-reward thing to try, because he can always go back to the sanctions.
I love the fact, another topic here, that Trump has passed some vague...
Some kind of vague, I guess, executive order about colleges.
They have to recognize free speech in order to get federal funding.
And people are saying, it's too vague.
How do you even measure such a thing?
And I just thought, it's frickin' brilliant.
Because he's creating a situation where he's making his opponents It's bad enough that the Democrats are going to have to argue against capitalism.
That's pretty hard. But they're doing it, and they're doing pretty well, I would say.
The Democrats are actually doing a surprisingly good job of arguing against capitalism, the engine that's created everything good in the world, practically.
But he's also making them argue against freedom of speech.
And by doing things that are so pro-Israel, like the Golan Heights, like the embassy, he's making his critics argue that he is anti-Jewish at the same time he's the most pro-Israel president of all time.
And they have to explain that.
So that's funny.
I've noticed that I'm jumping around here a little bit.
I've noticed that when I and other people shut down the people on Twitter who think that the fine people quote actually was real and that the president called racist fine people, the people actually believe that when you send them the transcript and the video, which I've been doing over and over, and you show people that they have a false memory and that he never said what they thought he said, do you know what people do?
They all say the same thing.
It's amazing watching it.
They all default to a backup position, which is, well, yeah, there might have been some people there who were not technically signed up for the neo-Nazis, but how can they be fine people if they're marching with them?
Now, there is no evidence...
That the non-Nazis, the non-racists, who were there for the purposes of supporting free speech, supporting the historical importance of the statues, which, by the way, I completely disagree with.
I'm opposed to statues that are offensive, but I'm just describing the situation.
Certainly, they were not marching with...
The racists. So the way I've been answering that is to say, people can be in the same zip code for different reasons.
It's the most normal thing in the world.
Indeed, there were many members of the press who were there.
Were the members of the press marching with the racists?
No, they were just in the same zip code for different reasons.
Was Antifa marching with the racists?
No. They were in the same zip code for different reasons.
Were the militia or the free speech people who disliked the racists, were they marching with the people they dislike?
No. They were there for their own purposes with their own message.
Now, I'm going to talk for a minute about why somebody could...
Amazingly back up to the marching with hallucination, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Oh, I love the news.
There's a suggestion that Joe Biden, who's leading in the polls, might be considering announcing with a vice presidential pick.
The idea, of course, is that he's not strong enough...
Everything about this is funny.
So if Joe Biden announces his campaign with a vice presidential pick, what does that tell you about Joe Biden?
What's the message that Joe Biden would be sending?
The message that Joe Biden would be sending is that he's not competitive by himself.
That if you were to do president to president, apparently he thinks he would lose.
In other words, he has to use a gimmick that nobody's ever done before to be competitive with the president.
So the first thing is, it's a huge signal of weakness that you would even have to try a gimmick such as announcing your vice president first.
Now, The person that is rumored that he's considering is Stacey Abrams, who I guess narrowly lost her election bid and is considered a rising star.
Now, she's African-American.
She's a woman. So she hits some checkboxes for the Democrats.
And the Democrats have been very clear About wanting their candidates to represent the diversity that they value.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
That's actually an entirely legitimate thing to do.
Make sure you've got a good mix of diversity in your party, because that's sort of a central theme.
Maybe more than anything else, that's their central theme.
But here's the thing.
If you have Biden...
Who is, by any description, an old white man.
And he's leading in the polls in your party that's supposed to be represented, more representative of the diversity of the country in every way.
That's a bad look.
What is the only way you could make that worse?
What's the only way you could make that look worse than nominating an old white guy?
To the party of diversity.
The only way you can make that worse is to have a gimmick woman who is an African American, no matter how qualified she is.
And I think everybody agrees, Stacey Abrams is very qualified.
So this is no comment about her talents or qualifications.
Those are established.
But it looks like A token kind of a thing that you would only think to do if you were an old white guy.
In other words, starting off with such a heavy-handed approach to the vice presidential pick, would send this glaring message, you thought Joe Biden was an old white guy?
Look at this.
He just proved that he's the most stereotypical old white guy you could ever have.
He just told you he has a black friend.
I mean, basically, starting off with an African-American woman as your vice presidential pick, if you're Joe Biden, this would not apply to other candidates.
So what I'm saying would not apply to...
Really any other candidate.
It's only because he's an old white guy in the party of diversity.
It just would look desperate and it would send all the wrong message.
So, the slaughter index is at 100% right now.
Okay. Let's talk about...
Oh.
So, I'm going to go into some really touchy territory.
And there are some topics that you can't talk about until other things have happened.
So the environment has to be right, or there are some topics you just can't talk about.
And I'm going to talk about one of them now.
And it's only because the environment is right.
And the environment in this case is that now that we've conclusively seen...
That the Russia collusion thing is fake news.
As far as we can tell, it looks like fake news.
And we've seen that the fine people hoax about Charlottesville is fake news.
And in fact, I believe the edit to make that correct is now a permanent edit on Wikipedia.
We'll see if it lasts.
But the Wikipedia editors have finally agreed that it wasn't real.
And they edited to...
To correct that. We'll see if that lasts.
But now that the world has softened up to this concept of how much they've been duped by fake news, I can introduce a new topic that I could not have introduced until that was true.
Steve King.
Steve King is a Republican who, I'm going to start right off by saying, I think he's an idiot.
Based on what I've observed, kind of an idiot.
Because the things he says get him in so much trouble, and he just walks into one trap after another.
Now, somebody's saying he's a nice guy.
I've heard that. I've actually heard that he's a nice guy.
But here's the thing.
I'm not going to defend Steve King.
So what will follow is not an apologist thing for Steve King.
It's not an endorsement of him.
It's not any kind of a spin.
I'm only going to talk about one thing he said and how the news covered it.
I'm going to read you an exact sentence that's on Wikipedia.
It's in almost every news site.
Here's the exact sentence.
That Steve King did say.
So what I'm going to read you is true news.
It's an actual sentence.
He did speak. And listen to how terrible this is.
But you have to wait for the punchline, right?
Here it is. This is an actual quote which Steve King has acknowledged.
He said these words, but he says the context is wrong.
We'll see. And here's the quote.
From Steve King, quote, white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization, how did that language become offensive?
King wonders in the piece, a New York Times interview.
Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?
Now, when you read that sentence, white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization, how did that language become offensive?
You interpret it as, wait a minute, he just said white supremacists?
That language should not be...
Basically, it makes it sound like he's defending white supremacists.
And you say to yourself, well, this can't be fake news because that quote is very clear.
Listen to the words.
White nationalists? White supremacists?
Western civilization? How did that language become offensive?
Isn't that as clear as it could possibly be?
That he's endorsing white supremacists?
Now, he claimed he wasn't.
But how could that possibly be, you say?
How could that be fake news?
And I guarantee you, he said those exact words.
Let me tell you how.
They turned it into fake news with punctuation.
They put a comma between white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization.
Dash, and then his statement about Western civilization.
If you hear it live, it doesn't sound this way.
If you hear it live, you understand that the first two words, white nationalist, white supremacist, belong to the prior thought that they don't report.
What was the sentence right before it?
Because that was what he was answering.
What he did was, he paused a little bit, and then he introduced a new thought.
The new thought was Western civilization.
How did that language become offensive?
In other words, he was saying that That some things are offensive.
White nationalists and white supremacists, those are offensive.
And that's what his prior conversation was about.
He paused, but then he said, Western civilization...
Now, Western civilization is not white supremacy.
It's not white nationalists.
It's about the culture.
You could argue about this point, but I'm just saying what the point was.
And his point was that Western civilization has been demonized as being equal to white supremacy.
That is the opposite of how it was reported by Anderson Cooper last night.
As recently as last night, Anderson Cooper reported, with no context, That Steve King wondered why white supremacists was suddenly bad.
Never happened.
It is a complete fake news.
Now, here's the problem.
If anybody takes this out of context, they're going to say, cartoonists support white supremacists, right?
Wouldn't that happen? And don't you expect that will happen?
Somebody's going to write the article that says, cartoonist supports white supremacists.
But you just heard me say, I think he's an idiot.
I don't support anything else he said, and maybe some of those things are bad.
And if he said bad things, well, that's on him.
But this quote, the one that they used to support all of his other quotes being bad, literally didn't happen.
He said it didn't happen, and he's clarified it before.
Now, the latest thing that Steve King said was that he compared the Katrina victims to the flood victims in Iowa.
And I'm paraphrasing, but he said essentially that the Katrina victims were waiting for the government to help them, but the good people in Iowa were saying, how can I help my neighbors?
And Anderson Cooper reported that as clearly a racist trope.
His point being that if the Katrina victims were more likely to be black and the Iowa residents were more likely to be white, that what Steve King really meant is that the minorities were not as helpful as the good white people in Iowa.
Now, Let me give you some perspective.
I grew up in a rural area.
I did not grow up in a city.
So let me tell you what Steve King actually meant and actually said, and what everyone in Iowa understood.
So what I'm going to say, I'll bet you everybody in Iowa understood.
And it goes like this.
City people can have low character.
Country people, the rural people, farmers, people in the Midwest, people in Iowa, they're good people.
They're more neighbor helping.
That is what I believed when I grew up, that the city people were maybe a little self-absorbed, a little selfish.
Country people were generous.
Help your neighbor. Steve King was making a contrast between the good rural people of Iowa and Of all colors.
Of all colors and types.
He was not saying the white people in Iowa are awesome.
He didn't say that.
He said Iowa. I'm pretty sure there are some minorities in Iowa.
He didn't say the black people who were the victims of the flood were somehow low character.
He was saying, you know, the people in that area.
It was clearly a contrast to the Democrats in the city versus the good people in the country.
It's a common thing that people like I grew up hearing all the time.
It did not have a racial element.
Until Anderson Cooper, who probably, I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing Anderson Cooper grew up in mostly city environments.
If that was your perspective, and you heard Steve King talk like that, you might think the same thing Anderson Cooper thought.
What else could it mean?
What would be any other way to interpret this than some kind of a racial comment?
And the answer is, ask anybody who grew up in the country.
Ask them how to interpret it.
They will tell you that there's sort of this general belief that the country people are more neighbor-oriented than city people.
That's it. Now, am I a Steve King apologist because I understand what he said?
Somebody's going to call me that.
Now, I want to introduce you to a new concept.
This is a filter for understanding your world, and this will come in really helpful with all of the Russia collusion craziness you're going to see and all the TDS. So here's a way to understand the world.
There are three kinds of people, at least there are more than that, of course, but for the purposes of this conversation, there are three types.
There are people who conflate.
In other words, they combine things just automatically in their minds.
There are people who isolate.
In other words, they say, I'm just going to look at this item here without this other noise.
And then there are people who advocate.
And basically, they're liars.
So the advocates are just liars who are advocating for a cause.
They don't care about the truth.
They're just trying to get to an end point.
Now, I'm going to make a great generalization, and I don't claim that there are individuals who fall strictly into one category.
You know, people can be spread across these categories, but there is a tendency to be mostly in one of them.
If you are, for example, an artist or a writer or a musician, you're probably a conflator.
And what I mean by that is that everything seems connected to you, because in your world, that's all you see.
A song, for example, has to all make sense.
You can't have suddenly you changing something basic about the song.
So the beginning of the song and the end of the song are related.
So a musician says, everything's related.
It's all connected.
If you're writing a novel, And you have some foreshadowing in the first chapter, like, then Bob looked at his watch.
It was his favorite watch.
He always looked at his watch.
If you're reading the novel, you say, oh, that means something.
That wouldn't be in the story unless we were supposed to connect this to something that's going to happen later.
So I know they're all connected.
That's not how the real world works.
It's how fiction works.
But if fiction is your filter on life, you start seeing everything connected.
And artists.
Artists are combiners.
They take things from different places, they put it together until everything's combined.
This is the opposite of what engineers, scientists, economists, and business people do.
This group of people and their training and their professions tell them that they must first isolate in order to understand.
So you have to get rid of all the variables that are not right.
If it's climate change, you have to make sure that you've accounted for the sun and take that out.
You've accounted for everything else.
Now you could argue whether they've done it right, But that's the discipline.
You're looking to separate things so you can look at them individually.
And then advocates are usually lawyers, politicians, and activists, and they're mostly liars.
Now, when you're on social media or you're watching the news, what types of people are you seeing the most?
Who has the greatest presence on TV news and the greatest presence in terms of influence on social media?
Well, it's the advocates because they have incentive, right?
The advocates you see on TV all the time.
And you see the conflators who think everything must be connected and there's no such thing as a coincidence and what else could explain it.
This group are largely underrepresented.
Now, how big of a problem is this?
Well, here's how it's relevant to you.
I'm going to show you a specific situation, and you can see how the different people will handle it.
Let's say you've decided that the president is a bad people because he said that racists in Charlottesville were fine people.
And now you take that person and say, oh, that was a hoax.
You think that he said the racists were fine people because you're seeing it on your news programs.
But the news is giving you fake news.
Here's the actual transcript.
Here's a link to the video.
So you can check for yourself that that's fake news.
He never said that. He, in fact, said specifically, I'm not talking about the racists.
So let's say you've found a way to debunk this.
So now this is debunked.
Which of those groups that I talked about would accept the new facts?
Well, somebody who was a trained scientist might say, okay, I get that.
You showed me the transcript.
An economist might, in fact, yesterday or the day before, I forwarded an economist who believed this was true, looked at the evidence, isolated just that situation and said, holy cow, that was fake news.
It's proven. So the people who isolate can look at this, look at the evidence and say, I get it.
The people who conflate, what do they do?
As soon as you disprove this, what do they do?
They say, we know it's true, not because it's obvious in what he said, but because of other things he's done.
It's all connected.
So this is the artist's view, right?
So the artist's view is, well, all right, what about the fact that he didn't immediately disavow David Duke?
I mean, that kind of proves that maybe this was really true after all, right, Scott?
Right. And I say, well, let me send you a video clip of a compilation of Trump disavowing David Duke as far back as years ago.
Now, I don't know why that one time when Jake Tapper asked him the question, he gave an awkward answer that didn't make sense.
He said he didn't know who David Duke was.
My best guess, and this would just be speculation, is that David Duke is sort of an ordinary name.
I can tell you that in my own life, people have mentioned David Duke, and for a moment I thought, David Duke, that is...
And I couldn't quite place David Duke right away, so maybe there was some of that.
Maybe the president thought there was a trap coming.
Maybe his earpiece didn't work, which is actually pretty common.
I've done a lot of interviews with earpieces.
The number of times they don't work is actually higher than you would imagine.
So it's pretty common to have a bad sound.
So I don't know why he answered it that way, but we do know that he disavowed David Duke before that lots of times.
We know that when he was asked the next day, he disavowed him specifically.
So if you were to isolate this and see all the times that he disavowed him, you'd probably say to yourself, well, I don't know what was going on in that Tapper interview.
But it's obvious he disavowed him before and after.
He's not the kind of personality, the president isn't, where he changes his mind on things that he really believes.
So if he really believed that he wanted to praise David Duke, I think he would have done it the next day too.
He doesn't really change that much.
So the fact that he disavowed him so many times should take that off the table.
But if you say that, the conflators will say, well, I see what you're saying.
He did disavow them clearly.
But I don't believe he meant it.
Do you know why? Because, you know, if he said this...
So they start conflating all the things which are not true...
To support all the other things that are not true.
So the artists, the musicians, the writers are more likely to see this whole picture and think it's meaningful.
The scientists, the engineer, the economist are more likely to say, let's isolate this and just don't talk about this.
Let's just see if this is true.
Remember that time the president mocked the reporter who had a genetic condition with his arm, he had a bad arm, and it looked like the president was doing a hand motion to mock him?
Well, most of you who are Trump supporters have seen the compilation video where the president uses that same hand motion To mock other people.
It's just a common thing he's done a lot of times in lots of speeches.
So you show this to somebody who believes that it must be proof that he mocked a guy with a bad arm.
And you show him that he always uses this same motion.
What does the scientist and the economist and the engineer say?
Okay, you isolated that and you made your point.
Okay, I accept that.
What does the artist, the writer, or the musician say?
Yeah, well, obviously that's a lie, and your video is a lie, and you really did mean it as mocking.
Why do I believe that? Because I believe this, and I believe this.
Scott, you have to look at it all.
You have to look at the whole picture.
Then you say, how about this Judge Curiel thing, where he thought that a judge with Mexican heritage might not be fair?
And then I say, Well, in the context of legal stuff, you're supposed to ask if somebody has bias.
That's the most common thing you do.
The entire jury selection process is identifying bias and removing.
The president said that he was, quite reasonably, the most reviled person by people who have Mexican heritage.
So if you pick somebody who has Mexican heritage, And they've got an answer to their family reunion.
They've got an answer to their family.
They're probably, you know, more likely to have contact with people who hate the president.
Can he get a fair shake?
Now, that was reported as he thinks that the president thinks Mexicans can't be good judges.
He never said anything like that.
He said that if the situation, the case...
It has some specific element that this specific person could be considered at least to observers to maybe have a bias.
Maybe you should think about that.
Maybe you should do something about it.
Completely normal legal strategy which worked because the judge actually ended up ruling in his case in the gray area probably because he didn't want to be seen as biased.
So as a legal strategy, it was fine.
Central Park Five, people say, well, what about Central Park Five?
Trump said that the five black people who were accused of violent rape in the Central Park, he did a full-page ad in which he said they should be executed, and he even said that after they were found not guilty.
So that's proof of racism, right?
To which I say, what part of that is about race?
There's literally nothing in that story That has anything to do with Trump and race.
It is simply a fact that the five people who were wrongly accused were black.
Trump didn't make them black.
He's opposed to any kind of crime.
He's the most consistently pro-police, anti-crime person you've ever known.
Why would he make an exception because they were black?
Of course he doesn't like crime.
Now, some people say, but wait, he still says they might be guilty even after the court found them innocent.
To which I say, and?
When does he say he was wrong?
Are there other situations you can look to where he admits he was wrong and apologizes?
He doesn't do that.
He doesn't do it in this case.
He doesn't do it in any case.
There's literally no substance to the claim that this is racially motivated, except you believe it's true.
Why? Because of all the other things.
But all the other things are also hoaxes.
They're not real.
Let's take another one.
Did he really say that all Mexicans are rapists?
That's the way it's reported.
No, he did not believe that the children and the women were rapists.
Did he think that there's too much crime coming?
Yes. Does he exaggerate literally everything?
Yes. He exaggerates his crowd size.
He exaggerates how bad his opponents are.
He exaggerates how poorly Obama did as a president.
He exaggerates how rich he is.
He exaggerates how quickly he beat ISIS. He exaggerates how good the economy is.
Did he exaggerate about the amount of crime coming across the border?
Yes! He exaggerates everything.
The fact that he exaggerates everything should be enough to tell you that this wasn't the one time he decided to be all racist.
The Muslim ban?
People say, alright, but Scott, the Muslim ban?
That one's pretty clear.
That's anti-Muslim.
Well, listen to the entire quote.
He said he wanted to, when he was on the campaign trail, I think that's when he was talking about it originally, he said that he wanted to do a Muslim ban until they could figure out what's going on.
Here's the context.
Terrorists can more easily hide with other Muslims.
So, since he can't tell which ones are the terrorists and which are not, He said, until we can figure that out, until we know what's going on, let's just stop it.
Is that bad for Muslims who do not live in the country?
Yes, it's bad for the good people who just wanted to escape a bad situation.
It's very bad for the people who are not Americans who would like to get into the country.
This president has said very clearly he's going to favor the Americans who are citizens over the people who are not Americans.
So did he discriminate against non-Americans?
Yes. That's what he's hired to do.
We hire him to discriminate against non-Americans and to favor Americans and their interests.
Was it bad for the good Muslims who would like to get into the country through immigration?
Yes, it was bad for them. But he doesn't have an obligation to be good to people who are not Americans, if it would be bad for Americans to do so.
So, as soon as they did figure out what's going on, they realized that they could narrow it to countries that don't have good records.
And he did.
Some of those countries were not even Muslim countries.
And many of the countries that are not part of the band are Muslim countries.
So, Once again, if you sort of walk through...
Oh, there's the housing discrimination back in the 70s or whatever.
A Trump entity, the people working for the Trump organization apparently discriminated by race.
As far as I know, there's no evidence that Trump made that decision.
There's only evidence that the employees discriminated by race.
It was their job to get a good result.
Evidently, they thought that they couldn't get a good result...
Because of their racial views or the views that they thought other people had about race.
So that's the closest you can get is that people he knew were racist or did a racist thing.
That's the closest you can get is that people he knew did something bad.
So if you are an economist, a scientist, an engineer, you would look at each of these and you would ignore all the others and you'd say, all right, just prove this one is true.
Prove this one's true. And you could get to something closer to truth.
If you are an artist, you conflate.
Now, I've been testing this theory on social media.
And so on Twitter, I try to guess what somebody's occupation is by the quality of their comments.
And I want you to try this at home, because it's funny.
So yesterday I was talking to somebody who was doing the conflating thing, and he was just bringing into the issue all kinds of things that just were not part of the conversation.
And so I thought to myself, I wonder what kind of artist this person is.
So I click on the profile, musician.
There was another person the day before, who again was conflating all these things that weren't part of the decision.
And I thought to myself, I wonder what kind of artist they are.
Click, art director.
Yesterday I was talking with somebody who was, again, conflating all of these things like they all somehow support the point.
And I thought to myself, huh, I wonder what kind of artist this person is.
Click, author, writer.
And so look for this.
So somebody says, Scott's an artist.
You are right. I'm not sure I'm a real artist.
I'm barely an artist.
But my background is I have a degree in economics, an MBA in business, 16 years of corporate experience, including marketing, strategy, sales, all kinds of different exposures.
And I worked in engineering for most of that time.
So my exposure is across all of those fields, and I prefer to be an isolator.
So when I'm talking about politics, I isolate.
When I'm trying to be an artist, I conflate.
So in the comic, I am combining things that don't necessarily need to get combined, and that's what makes it funny.
That's what makes it art. You're combining things that are not normally combined.
So I do both.
And so I would say to look for this.
I would say to look for this effect, that when you see people bringing in unrelated things to the conversation, click on the profile and see if they are an artist.
You will be surprised and amused how often that's the case.
Teachers too.
Well, I suppose it would depend.
Somebody says that teachers fall into that category.
That's probably a split decision.
Because if you're a science teacher, you probably have a different view than if you're an English teacher.
That's just a guess.
All right. What about confirmation bias?
Well, this is confirmation bias.
So the people who are the artists are far more likely to be fooled by confirmation bias because they live in a world where every clue means something.
Scientists live in a world where every clue is almost always meaningless.
It's very rare when a coincidence is actually meaningful.
You know, if you look at all the coincidences that there are, very rarely does one mean anything in the scientific world.
In the artistic world, a coincidence always means something.
The coincidences are put there intentionally to mean something.
So you should not be surprised if the people who come up through the arts See coincidence as meaningful.
All right. That is all for now.
And I am going to go do something else.
And I hope that you will enjoy the ongoing struggle that CNN has in explaining why the Mueller report is really bad news for the president, but it's in disguise.
Really, something else is happening.
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