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April 25, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
35:30
Episode 507 Scott Adams: Biden’s Race Hoax Gaffe, North Korea, Felons Voting
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Hey, Joanne.
Hey, Kate. Come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And if you're in here early, you can enjoy the simultaneous sip.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, some kind of a stein or a cellist or a thermos, a tankard, if you will.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now...
for this simultaneous sip.
Ah.
So, the big news of the day.
um I'm going to wait for a few more people to get in before the biggest news of the day.
Let's talk about felons voting.
I love this felons voting question because...
All it really is is a great political fodder.
You know, the importance of it is probably pretty low.
But I love the fact that the Democrats have so little to run on that giving prisoners and murderers the vote is part of their top three.
I had said that I supported giving prisoners the vote.
My reasoning is that it's for the benefit of the rest of society.
It's not because it's good or bad or anything for the prisoners themselves.
It's that it helps make them part of the system, buy into the system, etc.
So for the people who are not in prison, that would be you and me, it's good for us If criminals vote, to the extent that it's one small part of making them part of a system, giving them a little buy-in to the system, making them feel part of the process.
Now, people have said, quite reasonably, wait a minute, are you saying murderers should vote?
They took the vote away from someone else.
Now, that argument is not rational.
Because we can punish the prisoners however the law requires.
We could say we're going to give you 50 years in prison and we're going to slap you in the head if the law said that.
We could pass a law that said we're going to put you in prison and we're going to play bad music in your cell if the law said that.
In other words, we can pass a law that as long as it's not cruel and unusual can be part of the punishment.
I suppose playing bad music all day would be cruel and unusual, so maybe that one's a bad example.
But... So let me just complete this, and then I'll comment to a comment there.
So if somebody wants to make an exception and say, yes, prisoners, maybe they should vote, it makes them part of the system.
It's part of rehabilitation, but not murderers.
And not maybe terrorists.
I'd be okay with an exception.
I see no reason that you can't make an exception for murderers and terrorists if you want to extend that to rapists or other violent criminals.
It's okay with me.
We can have any laws we want so long as they're agreed by the public.
But in general, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, meaning that there is some value to society Of getting prisoners a little bit pregnant and believing in the system.
So I agree with that statement, but it's a terrible thing to mount your campaign on.
So, independent of whether there's any good or bad to that idea of letting prisoners vote, independent of the facts, it's a terrible thing to wrap your campaign around.
It's a terrible thing to have to comment on.
Now, some of you said in the comments, That those prisoners, well, here are a few problems.
One is that the prisons tend to be located in specific places.
So you might have a whole bunch of prisoners in one county and it might be enough to actually sway an election.
And that would be bad.
So one of the things you could do is to say that everybody gets to vote But their vote only counts in their prior residence.
In other words, no matter where they are in prison, their vote is distributed out to the places that they were living before they were in prison.
So that would at least not have them concentrated in one county where they can elect their own warden or something.
I don't know if you can elect a warden, but you can elect whoever appoints a warden or hires a warden, maybe.
So you got that.
And then some of you were worried that the prisoners would vote essentially in favor of crime.
So somebody was saying, do you expect a convicted rapist to vote for anything that would be protective of women?
To which I say, I think you'd be surprised.
I don't know this for sure.
But I also don't know that there's a problem here, which is, for example, I'm not entirely sure that murderers are in favor of murder.
I don't think they are.
Are they? Even if you were to do a poll of convicted murderers, How many of them would be in favor of murder?
I think you'd actually find a very small number of them were in favor of murder, even if they did it.
Likewise, convicted rapists.
How many convicted rapists would support some kind of a law that would make it easier for rapists to get away?
Well, some, but probably not most.
Probably not most.
So I'm not sure there's a big problem, given that the votes would be distributed around the country.
There are very few laws that actually are so on point that a person's in jail for something so similar.
I just don't see it as a big problem.
Now, those of you who are worried that they'll mostly vote Democrat...
I say to you, if anybody's voting for the other team, you just have to work harder to get their vote.
That's how the system works.
So I see the point that they might vote Democrat, but why not work harder and try to get those votes?
After all, which party in power got prison reform through?
If you were a prisoner, Would you care about anything more than prison reform to get you out of prison early and get you a job?
It's probably what you'd care about most, and that's a Republican-led thing.
Anyway, so enough about that.
Let's talk about Joe Biden's tragic gaffe of the century announcement.
Joe frickin' Biden, possibly the worst person in the country right now, or the dumbest, I can't tell.
It depends if he believes what he said.
I suspect he believes what he said.
Free stuff for felons.
I can't leave this.
Giving felons the right to vote is not really giving them anything.
Because the right to vote for any one person is so vanishingly small that you can just ignore it for all practical purposes.
It's not like giving them candy or giving them money.
Allowing them to participate in the system is not a gift, per se.
Anyway... So just consider that maybe your opinions on prison reform have more to do with revenge and emotion and less to do with what's good for society.
Joe Biden started his announcement for presidency by repeating the Charlottesville fine people hoax.
The most dangerous and divisive and harmful hoax Maybe even more than the Russian collusion hoax.
It's up there. It's the number two hoax.
So the moment the Russia collusion hoax is at least a little bit diminished, the Democrats come back with a new hoax.
It's going to be like the launching pad for his campaign.
And I noted if you listen to it.
So he starts off talking about Charlottesville, and he mentions Jefferson.
And he mentions that even Jefferson, you know, was not perfect.
And I'm thinking to myself, Jefferson was a slave owner, which is what he was referring to.
And I just don't know if coming out against Confederate statues...
But in favor of a slave owner, within two minutes, in the context of the announcement of your race for the presidency, is maybe one of the dumbest things you've ever seen.
He seemed to endorse Antifa, because they were the brave people there fighting the neo-Nazis, according to him.
He literally endorsed masked weapon-wielding Anarchists who would like to destroy the government of the United States.
He thought they were great people.
He actually said that.
He actually said that.
Amazing. So, it seems to me maybe, I think it would be the worst presidential launch of all time.
Probably the worst one.
But I wanted to do something for your entertainment.
If any of you have an Amazon A-L-E-X-A, I'm going to be talking to it right now in your home and mine.
So you might want to turn off the sound for a minute if you don't want your A-L-E-X-A to say something in your house.
Watch this. Alexa.
How old is Creepy Joe Biden?
Sorry, I don't know that.
Alexa, how old is Creepy Joe Biden?
Sorry, I still didn't get that.
But if you're up for a game, I've got lots of fun ones to choose from.
Okay. So, this was a lot funnier...
Alexa, cancel.
This was funnier when I tested it before I came on Periscope.
I actually asked the question using his name, Creepy Joe Biden, and Alexa just answered the question.
This time I asked exactly the same question and she didn't answer it.
Did you notice that?
Makes me wonder if anybody's playing with it behind the scenes.
But, I guarantee you, I tried this right before I came on live, and calling him Creepy Joe Biden got me a response.
Let's talk about...
Well, let's talk about Biden's chances.
I would put Biden's chances at zero.
I don't know if any of you agree.
But, when he announced, I actually...
I strongly consider donating to Bernie Sanders, and not because I think Bernie Sanders should be president, because I don't, but because anybody who's spreading this Charlottesville hoax, they really need to be taken out.
So I pinned to my Twitter feed a useful series of links in a thread, So it's pinned to my Twitter so you can easily find it.
And it's the response to all the fine people hoax people who believe it.
Now there's an interesting thing when you point out to people that they've been hoaxed about what fine people refer to, and you show them the actual transcript where it says in clear language that the president says, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
They should be condemned totally.
Now that sentence is as clear as you could get.
So if somebody thought he was talking about those people being fine people, and you show them the transcript, and the words say just what I said.
I'm not talking about those people.
They should be condemned totally.
Nobody asked him to say that.
He added that on his own to make sure nobody misunderstood what he was saying.
This was the president. Now, what happens when somebody believes the president said the racists were fine people and then you show them the transcript where it unambiguously says he's not talking about that group?
What do people do?
So far, 100% of the people that I've seen online, and it's a lot of people, do the same thing.
They say, well, well, if they were marching with, and they all seem to default to the same phrase, you can't be a fine person if you're marching with neo-Nazis.
And they'll all hallucinate Anybody who was there, who wasn't Antifa or the press, I guess, or the police, was actually marching with the Tiki Torch people.
Now that, of course, is a hallucination, because that didn't happen.
There were people there with militias, there were people there for supporting the historical importance of the statues, which I, you know, most of you know, I do not support the statues.
I think offensive decorations...
It should be taken down. Just because why would you want to offend other patriots in your country who are doing nothing but trying to enjoy the park and there's some stature that they would find quite offensive even if you think it's not.
It doesn't matter if you think it's not offensive.
If you're offending something like a third of the country, Maybe considering being a nicer person, even if you think they should not be offended.
You can observe that they are, and you wouldn't put an offensive declaration in your own house.
Why should we put it in public?
Anyway, that's my argument. But, nonetheless, there were plenty of people who were not racists who were there to support free speech, historical monuments, etc., And when you point out that the president was clearly not talking about the racists, the people who have been hoaxed will never say, oh, okay, I guess I got that wrong.
That just never happens.
Instead, it's weird how specifically they will move their argument the same way.
Pretty much every one of them, having been proven completely wrong, will say, yeah, but they can't be fine people.
If they're marching with, marching with, the part they add that never really happened, the neo-Nazis.
So in my tweet thread, you can see how to respond to that.
Somebody says, you are wrong, Scott.
All right, I'm going to get rid of whoever said you are wrong, Scott.
Because there's plenty of room for reasons.
If you have one, I'm happy to listen to it.
But you're wrong, Scott.
That's just a block.
So, I included in my thread some handy links for all the people who are experiencing the hysteria of the fine people hoax.
And one of those links is to a New York Times article where they talked to one of the fine people who was with the militia and they weren't there with the racists.
They were opposed to racists.
They just liked statues. Historical statues.
And free speech. And guns, apparently.
They liked guns and free speech and historical statues.
Now, so that's the link you want to send to people who say, but there could be no nice people there who are marching with Nazis.
That part is just a hallucination.
It is a complete hallucination.
Now, often they will retreat a second time.
So once you've pointed out that there were people there, and even the New York Times interviewed one, Who was not marching with any racists at all.
They were just in the same zip code.
People will then almost always retreat to, well, anybody who supports those offensive statues, if they're supporting statues, they can't be fine people.
To which I say, and I alone can say this because I also oppose Confederate statues, I say, well, hey, I oppose Confederate statues, and I also oppose putting slave owners on our currency.
Do you also oppose putting slave owners on currency?
Or, here's the fun part, Do you oppose putting slave owners on our currency, or do you side with the neo-Nazis on that point?
Isn't this fun?
Now, I was doing this this morning with one of my critics, who...
And by the way, it doesn't matter if you support...
Pictures of the founders on the currency.
That isn't the point.
The point is that when you point out to people that their wallet literally in their pocket, they have portraits of slave owners in their pocket.
If they're not complaining about that, you don't really need to listen about the statues, do you?
Do you? Do you really need to take anybody seriously about the statues if they've got like a wallet full of pictures of slave owners on their currency and they're okay with that?
Now what I do, which drives people crazy, is I do a thing called being consistent.
You so rarely see anybody being consistent that when it happens people actually can't see it.
It's actually hilarious.
So I start out with saying that there were fine people there at the event, so naturally everybody thinks, well, you must be a racist, Scott, if you think there was anybody there just for free speech and just to support statues.
Then I say, well, I'm against statues.
I just think that those people are not racists.
That's all. I don't agree with them on the statues.
I'm completely against it.
But if you're against statues and you're not with me against putting slave owners on currency, you're gonna have to explain why you're agreeing with the neo-Nazis.
You're gonna have to explain it.
Now, what happens to people when I put a big load of consistency on them?
Word salad.
So it's word salad.
You'll see the response.
It'll be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you look at it, you go, these words don't even make sense.
There's just words. So that's what happened this morning.
It was fun. All right.
Somebody says, I can't buy food with a statue, idiot.
Jeff the Drunk says, I can't buy food with a statue.
Yes, Jeff the Drunk, that is such an astute observation relevant to nothing.
Your point is a monument to stupidity.
I love Jeff the Drunk.
You are officially the dumbest commenter of the morning.
Thank you very much.
And now, You are deleted.
Fuck! Somebody says, where does this end?
Where does it end?
To which I say, why should progress ever end?
You know, when somebody says there's a slippery slope, somebody else is going to say completely honestly, you're talking about progress.
If what we're doing is getting rid of Confederate statues, hypothetically, just bear with me, if we get rid of Confederate statues because they were offensive and a sign of slavery, and then it goes further and somebody says, hey, maybe we have to get rid of the pictures of the slave owners on our currency.
To which I say, it's not a bad idea.
Isn't the whole point of currency to put the most respected people that are role models for the children?
Don't you want role models on your money?
If you ask me, we could find people who are not racist to put on money who would be pretty good role models.
I have no problem with that.
I would call it progress.
Somebody says, you'd be denying our history.
No! History is actually not much in a statue.
Do you remember when you went to school, when you were in school, and instead of books, they showed you Confederate statues?
Do you remember that? Neither do I. Because history is in books.
History is not taught by statues.
And its statues are irrelevant.
Quite irrelevant. Now, if somebody said, maybe we should just put these statues in context, perhaps you could add a plaque that gives the background and gives some context, to which I would say, that's not a bad idea.
That is not a bad idea.
Certainly something worthy of consideration.
Yeah, why not put me on the $100 bill, given all this good work I do on Periscope?
All right. How do we know which sins to pick?
Same way we always do, by power.
The slippery slope can only slide if there are enough people who want it to keep sliding.
The moment that there are fewer people who want it to slide or there's more power in the don't keep sliding, it stops sliding.
And then that's all the progress you get.
History is in museums.
Put statues in museums.
That's one way to go.
The Kate Smith removal is beyond the pale.
I don't know. I'd have to look into Kate Smith's background.
But she was anti-gay, and I don't know to what degree she was anti-gay.
But it must have been pretty bad.
So I'm not sure that I have a problem with that.
Say that to people of London or Rome.
I'm You know, if...
Let's take Rome, for example.
The Colosseum was a horrible place, but it's presented that way.
If you go to the Colosseum, nobody is hiding the fact that horrible things happened there.
If you go to the Holocaust Museum, nobody is hiding the fact that it's about horrible stuff.
But if you see a statue in the park, it's lacking context.
Where's all the context?
So if you had some context, it'd be okay.
All right. Chairman Kim went to visit Putin.
Chairman Kim went to visit Putin.
And Putin says it was a good meeting and he'll share the results with the United States.
And this made me optimistic.
Now, I've always said since the beginning of the, let's say, the loosening of North Korea, you know, from the point where they started to act like they wanted to make progress, I said that the ultimate solution is going to look something like the three major powers plus South Korea,
so Russia, the United States, and China, issuing some kind of a joint military, let's say, shield In which we would keep each other from attacking North Korea and keep anybody else from attacking them under the condition that they do convert their nuclear to, let's say, just energy instead of weapons.
Now, if I were Kim, I would want to get Putin and Xi and Trump all on the same page and say, look, here's the deal.
For me to give up my nuclear deterrence I need all three of you leaders to sign a document that says, even if one of us decides to move against North Korea, the other two are going to do what they can to prevent it.
And maybe it's economic, maybe it doesn't have to be military, but something with the little teeth that would say nobody is going to attack North Korea so long as North Korea doesn't So long as North Korea gets rid of their nukes and doesn't, let's say, counterfeit or whatever else they were doing.
So I think you could come up with a deal that would make Kim Jong-un feel safer and would be real.
Because I think if the three powers say, look, we can solve this, but all three of us have to be on the same page.
Let's just turn North Korea into an economic success story.
Let Kim Jong-un stay in power for now.
Work toward a 100-year plan for reunification.
There's no reason to rush.
Just do what you can when you can.
And get on the trail of improvement and friendship.
And I think we're already off the trail of being enemies.
But we're sort of just standing around figuring out where to go right now.
Do we go back to being enemies?
Do we continue on the peace trail?
So I think that would get us there.
So I would see the move forward, some kind of a declaration of the end of the war, with the three superpowers guaranteeing North Korea's security, So that they can start moving forward and Kim can declare victory.
And by the way, that would totally be a victory.
If Kim gets rid of his nukes, but what he gets in return, let's say he doesn't get rid of them, he converts his nuclear industry into peaceful energy for his country.
If he does that, and he ends the war permanently, and he gets the three superpowers to probably help him economically at the same time that they become a peace umbrella, That's a big, big, big win for Kim.
And we win too.
Essentially everybody wins.
So I think Kim is starting to put together a package, a diplomatic package, that might be the real deal.
Now, you don't want to get ahead of yourself because optimism has been always the wrong play when it comes to North Korea.
And I'm not ignorant of the fact that they've made promises before and it's all a stalling game, etc.
But what's different about this is that they have a clean path to the biggest victory they've ever had.
There is nothing in the way, nothing.
There is nothing preventing Chairman Kim from just walking a straight line to the biggest victory any leader ever had.
I mean, this would be one of the biggest victories for a leader of any kind anywhere, if he could turn North Korea into a protected economic powerhouse and convert the nuclear power, nuclear energy and the nuclear weapons industry into peaceful nuclear energy.
All right. North Korea could be a manufacturing powerhouse.
Yes, they could.
Does Chairman Kim listen to this periscope?
Well, well, I think so.
I don't mean him personally.
So no, Chairman Kim does not personally listen to my Periscope.
But here's what I do think is true.
I think that Kim has some, you know, department of people whose job it is to closely monitor the foreign press and foreign social media and foreign opinion.
So I think it is a guarantee That North Korea is monitoring closely the opinion makers in this country.
Now, where you would place me on the list of opinion makers, I would say I'm in the top 100.
Would you agree with that?
Because I think you would treat the major publications as sort of one thing, and they would monitor them.
So surely North Korea is monitoring the New York Times and CNN and Fox News and the big media outlets.
But you very quickly run out of them.
You know, there's maybe a top 20 So you can guarantee that they're looking at all of that.
And then beyond the news sources, there are the, I would say, the independent pundits.
So you've got your, well, you know, all the people who are not associated with a news outlet, you know, Ann Coulter, for example.
Does North Korea follow Ann Coulter?
Well, if they don't, They're missing out because she's certainly in the top 100 of opinion makers.
Now, the question of whether North Korea is familiar with anything I've said would sort of depend on two things.
One, am I in the top 100 of, let's say, opinion makers in this country?
I don't know. What do you think?
Yeah, Rush Limbaugh would be another, and there'd be a number on the left as well.
I think I'm easily in the top hundred, and they're probably watching at least the top hundred opinion makers.
So... And then secondly, is there anything that I've ever said that our own government liked and then shared with North Korea, either through South Korea or through...
It doesn't mean that they shared it in terms of putting my name on it, but were there any ideas...
That I've influenced anybody in our government to float to anybody in North Korea's domain.
Don't know. No way to know.
So... Yeah, I'm just looking at your comments here.
Yeah, Victor David Hansen.
There's a good one.
Do you think there's any chance that North Korea has never seen anything by Victor David Hansen?
I think they have, because he would certainly be in the top 100 opinion maker, and far higher than I would be, I would imagine.
So, Victor Davis Hanson.
I always say his name wrong.
Sorry, Davis, Davis.
Victor Davis Hanson.
I always make that same mistake.
I apologize. Did my meeting with Trump have any influence on North Korea?
I doubt it. I think you know that it's sort of a trick question, because in the unlikely event that Trump asked me anything important about policy, I wouldn't be able to tell you the conversation anyway.
But we didn't talk about anything important in policy, so the answer is no.
We talked about politics, but not policy.
Please interview VDH.
Yeah, Michael Malice.
I would assume that North Korea follows Michael Malice.
Same thing. All right, that's all I've got.
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