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May 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
59:16
Episode 522 Scott Adams: China, Iran, NK, Trump Taxes, Socialism, Coffee, and Guns
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Hey Janice, Divine, Chris, you're all the early ones.
And I appreciate it every time.
Thanks all for coming. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
You came to the right place for that.
Because you know what's next.
I think you do. Run!
Run! Get your cup, your mug, your stein, your...
Chalice your flask.
Could be a tank or door to thermos.
Could be any kind of a container, but once you've filled it with your favorite liquid, you know what time it is.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Here it comes. Good stuff.
So, I'm not going to talk about the latest shooting.
I'm intentionally ignoring that news, except where I see it in headlines.
So all I've allowed myself to know is that there's another one.
I'm going to intentionally not look at any names of people.
I'm intentionally not going to inform myself beyond the normal human empathy for the victims.
But somebody named Elmo...
The Wokest Wookiee tweeted this morning that Scott Adams, that's me, once brilliantly suggested, well, if I may be modest, he said, I once brilliantly suggested a compromise with the Democrats in which we make it illegal for Democrats to own guns.
In my opinion, this is the most common sense gun control.
Now, of course, that's a reference to the latest shooting and, of course, both sides try to pin it on the other one.
And again, I don't care about the shooter because I just don't want to know about him, don't want to give him attention.
Law enforcement will do what it can.
But I'm reminded of that idea.
And what's funny about it If guns can be funny, it's hard to be funny after a tragedy, but let me be respectful to the victims, but talk about the topic separately.
Why would Democrats object to making it illegal for Democrats to own guns?
Doesn't that solve half the problem?
Suppose you went in a different direction.
This is a similar suggestion.
Suppose you made it illegal to own a gun unless you're a member of the NRA. How about that?
I mean, that would probably get rid of most Democrats owning guns in the first place.
Now, the thinking would be that the NRA, I'm not a member, but I think this is true, that they operate in large part to make it safe to own a gun.
So there would be education and You know, reminders and access to gun locks and gun safes and essentially training and information about how to be a safer owner.
Now, here's the other thing about joining the NRA. And I don't know why nobody ever talks about this.
As far as I know, I'm the only person who's ever said the thing I'm going to say next.
If you join the NRA, you registered your gun.
Because do you think the government can't get a hold of the membership list of the NRA? Isn't joining the NRA gun control?
I mean, it's voluntary gun control.
You're literally putting yourself on a list of people who almost certainly have a gun or more than one gun.
Now, it's not so specific that it says what gun you own, but still...
How many people have ever joined the NRA without actually owning a gun?
Not every person, right?
There are probably people who joined and got rid of their gun because maybe they had a kid in the house or whatever reason.
You know, they lived somewhere and they couldn't have it.
So maybe temporarily somebody's in the NRA without a gun.
But in general, if you joined the NRA, you just bought into gun control.
I don't know what would be Stronger gun control than putting your name on a list of people who owns guns and submitting yourself to fairly continuous streams of gun safety information.
I would call that gun control.
Wouldn't you? I mean, politics aside, does that not do a lot of what gun control purports to do?
Anyway... So while it would be illegal to say, hey, you people, if you're a Democrat, you can't own a gun.
It's funny, but it's not legal because it would be treating people differently.
But certainly you could say you have to get a license, you have to register for things.
Those types of things are normal, legal stuff.
But nobody likes the government getting involved.
So let me offer an alternative.
Let's say this. Let's say there's a law that says you don't have to join the NRA, but if somebody kills somebody with one of your guns, you have a higher level of responsibility.
How about that?
Just say that you can own guns and you don't have to join the NRA, But if you do, your level of responsibility will be somehow insured against or, you know, maybe there'll be some degree of protection because at least you did that much.
I don't know if there's any practical way to work that out, but thinking in those terms.
Anyway, that's my thought for the day.
Let's talk about some other stuff.
Have you noticed that Thanks to Jerry Nadler, primarily.
The Democrats have turned one of the best parts of our government into something terrible.
One of the best parts of our government is the checks and balances, and specifically talking about the congressional oversight.
Is it my imagination?
Because first of all, I think congressional oversight, I'm no expert, but it seems like that would be an important thing to have.
And it should be important to continue having it when it makes sense.
But has Jerry Nadler taken that good thing and turned it into some weird process where he's become a stalker?
He's basically the president's stalker.
And the other part of the process of this oversight is manufacturing crimes.
Because you can force people into crimes pretty easily if you know what buttons to push.
And these big investigations apparently are very effective at forcing people into accidental crimes.
Crimes that they may not have known they committed.
If you don't even know you're committing a crime, You don't even know.
And you're a sophisticated person who pretty much knows what's legal and what isn't.
If you don't even know you're committing a crime, do we want our Congress to have the job of manufacturing crime?
So you've got the president who's working hard to reduce crime.
That's a true statement, right?
When you say that the president is working hard, I don't know what kind of success he's having, but you can see that the work is there.
He's trying to reduce it on the border.
He's trying to reduce crime.
Even the first step program is, if everything works out well, a way to rehabilitate people so that they're less likely to commit more crimes.
So you see the president, whether or not he's successful, Working hard to reduce crime.
What did Jerry Nadler do this month?
I'm pretty sure he worked hard to manufacture crime.
He's actually creating crime out of things that people didn't even know were illegal.
Well, I talked to somebody, I fired somebody, I thought about this, and suddenly you're obstructing justice for a crime that didn't exist in the first place, the collusion situation.
So, and then when we look at the tax returns, I'll talk about that.
But getting a hold of the President's tax returns, the thing that Nadler wants, doesn't that seem like what a stalker would do?
What does a stalker do?
The first thing they do is they try to hack into your private accounts, right?
A hacker tries to get your private information.
A stalker. So the difference between Nadler and And the stalker seems to be narrowing, right?
It's getting smaller and smaller.
And somehow that's still okay with the Democrats.
The Democrats are watching their team turn into stalkers and manufacturers of crimes that didn't need to happen.
Amazing. Let's talk about the tax returns.
So the New York Times... It has apparently gone full WikiLeaks, meaning publishing information that was stolen or illegally obtained in this case.
So we don't know the details, but it seems, based on the New York Times' own reporting, that the information was illegally obtained.
And then provided to the New York Times, who does not have any responsibility because they're just a publisher of things that other people stole, which apparently is legal enough, but not legal enough for Wikipedia, not Wikipedia, for WikiLeaks, for reasons that are unclear.
Now, of course, the Democrats had run out of things to say about the president, because things were going so well in the country.
And they lost all of their big arguments.
You know, they watched the Russia collusion collapse.
They watched the fine people hoax become more of a laughing stock than a good complaint.
And we watched the president give the highest civilian award to Tiger Woods.
Now, nobody said anything about race when that happened, or at least I didn't see it, which is good.
I suppose we're growing up a little bit that nobody made any race-related comments about Tiger Woods.
As an image, it so violates what the Democrats think about this president because it doesn't fit their story.
Their story is he's a big old racist and he's sending racist signals to some part of his base.
But I'm pretty sure Tiger Woods is at least part black.
And nobody talks about that.
It's like, how does that make sense?
Because it's optional, right?
The president didn't need to give Tiger Woods an award.
It wasn't like the country was asking for it.
It wasn't polling well.
There was literally no reason to do it, except he thought it would be worth doing.
And it was for golf, after all, of all things.
He golfs really well.
So, if you're a Democrat, you're looking and all of your beliefs just blow up in your face.
Because the economy is good, the president doesn't seem to have a mental illness.
You know, we would have noticed by now.
And, you know, it's all falling apart.
So they did a new thing, and luckily they got this tax thing.
And, of course, we're all watching in amazement as something that Trump wrote about in his own book, The most public thing that anybody could ever talk about with the president, the thing that's been reported forever, which is he took enormous losses and was near bankruptcy at one period, and then he worked his way back.
So the reporting, basically the stuff we already knew, stuff that he said publicly and often wrote a book about it, shouldn't be any surprises.
But the way they treat it is, of course, with the usual financial ignorance.
Now, the president explained it this way.
And I'm not going to take his explanation as, let's say, completely correct.
Let's say that there might be some hyperbole on both sides here, and it's hard to sort that out.
So, I don't know what the hyperbole is on the President's side, but let's just assume that there's some there.
Now, what the President explained in his tweet that I don't think most of the country understands Is that if you have a business in which you're buying expensive assets and then depreciating them, and you're building, this is the key parts.
If you have these two things happening, you're buying expensive assets or building.
So let's say a building is an expensive asset.
So you're building expensive assets, you're depreciating them, and here's the second part that's important.
You're growing. So if it's a growing company that's building more and more and more, and let's say each building is bigger than the building before, what you should see, if everything is working just right, is losses for the entire building period.
So if you did everything right, it should look exactly the way Trump's taxes look.
You eliminate your taxes, you negotiate with bankers when you need to, or if you can, or as the President called it, sport, normal development stuff.
So let me give you another example.
Many years ago, Comcast was a small, unprofitable, on paper, unprofitable, cable business.
And because putting cable into neighborhoods is a big asset, expensive thing, they were buying expensive things all the time, you know, buying rights and putting in cables all over the place.
Very, very expensive.
But they could depreciate that stuff, and they were growing.
So what would have been one of the best stocks you could have ever purchased?
Comcast. Even though for...
I'm talking off the top of my head.
Somebody's going to need to look into the numbers here.
But I think that they lost money on paper for 20 years?
10 years? I don't know.
I feel like they lost money on paper for years and years and years.
Did they not? Somebody needs to fact check me on that.
I saw in the comments somebody mentioned Amazon.
Amazon, exactly the same situation.
Buying expensive assets like crazy, depreciating them, so you've got losses on paper, but growing.
Now, where does the money come from if you're growing?
Those of you who understand finance, you're losing money on paper on each deal, but you're probably also spending more actual cash Then you're producing.
Where does the money come from?
The money comes from banks.
Somebody says taxpayers. Not really.
The money comes from banks.
Why does a bank give somebody a loan if they're losing money every year?
Because it's a good loan.
The bank doesn't give you a loan unless, you know, for a new building.
Unless they can look at that building and they can say, okay, this is a good deal.
It's going to look like it's going to lose money for years, but then it'll be a cash cow after that.
So, when you watch the New York Times talk to people who are ignorant about all things finance, it might be true that Trump made mistakes, business mistakes during that period.
I don't have any visibility on that.
You would expect somebody who made as many decisions as he did about as many high-risk, big projects, you would expect he had some mistakes.
And I don't think he would say otherwise.
But I don't know what they are, exactly.
And when you see the reporting, the things they talk about as if they're mistakes, We're not quite landing it on a finance level.
In other words, if you understand how business works, you understand how taxes work, you understand a little bit about how accounting works, you know what depreciation is, you know what cash flow is, you know what leverage is.
If you know all of those things, which would require you to have some serious either business training or business education, most of the public doesn't understand all of those issues.
But if you do, What the New York Times reported just lays there on the page.
It doesn't tell me anything good, and it doesn't tell me anything bad.
It is simply a small part of a large picture which I can't see.
It doesn't mean really anything.
I mean, by itself, you would have to see the larger context.
If you could see the complete picture of how you went from not paying taxes to whatever situation the Trump empire is in right now, if you could see the whole story, I think you'd say, that looks pretty good.
I don't know. All right, let's talk about China.
So when I read a story about, as you know, the president has threatened greater tariffs on China because they seem to have pulled a step back on the negotiations.
So China seemed to have agreed to things and then changed their mind.
I didn't realize until this morning I read a report how much they changed their mind.
So apparently they took the agreement, which was reportedly 90% done, and then it went to China and their They're legal people or whatever, worked it up and made changes and sent it back, and suddenly it was just all wrong again, as if no negotiations had been happening for months.
Now, somebody's saying that's all just part of negotiations, and the answer is yes.
It would be dumb for China not to do what they did.
So you should expect, in all big negotiations, that somebody would do something that looked exactly like what China just did.
Do you know who else does that?
The person selling you a car.
You know how your car salesperson always says, well, I'd love to give you $5,000 off this car, but...
I'm going to have to check it with the boss.
And then they disappear for way too long.
They're just making you wait.
They're not actually talking about anything.
And they come back and they say, gosh, I would give you this for sure, but, you know, my boss says no.
Now, the purpose of this is to separate you, the customer, And have one person in between the person who's making the decision.
That's what China just did.
They had all these negotiators who had been negotiating for a long time, and then it looked like they'd made something close to a deal.
And as soon as those negotiators said, all right, now I just got to check it with the boss, whoever the boss is in this case.
It could be lawyers, could be President Xi.
And they take it back, and the boss says, oh, I can't do this.
So it's basically a way to stall for time and wear down the opposition so that without giving any good reasons, they just say, all right, we just got to get a deal done.
Now, I started to make a tweet this morning, and I changed my mind, and I don't know if I'm glad I did or not.
And I started to tweet, but did not tweet, the following.
Is China stalling on trade negotiations to wait and see if they get a President Biden to make a better deal?
And I wrote the tweet, I wrote it several ways, and then I decided not to send it, because I thought, well, maybe I don't know enough about this situation yet.
I'm not going to commit to that.
And then I saw that the president tweeted that exact thing.
So the president tweeted that China might be waiting for Biden.
Now, the thinking here is, if China is not trying to stall, why not?
Is China stupid?
China's not stupid.
You can say all you want about China taking, you know, intellectual property and, you know, you say what you will, negative about China, and I certainly do, especially about fentanyl.
You can say a lot that's negative about China, but do you see anybody calling them stupid?
Have you ever seen the president say China is stupid?
No. And do you think the president would hold back if he thought China was stupid?
No. No.
This president would tell you if he thought they were stupid.
And I have not seen anybody on either side, anybody in the world, suggest that China is stupid.
Now, the president does say that about Biden.
There is some suggestion that Biden would be soft on China relative to Trump.
Now, given that there are two things, timing-wise, that are important.
Number one, China knows that President Trump needs to deliver a trade deal.
And they know that 2020 is getting closer.
How much does Trump want a trade deal as you get closer to the election?
Oh, he wants it.
Closer you get to the election, the more Trump needs a deal.
Or they could just wait if Trump loses.
And what would China be doing to the stock market while the election is getting closer?
Well, if they resist on the trade deal, the stock market is going to go down.
What happens if the stock market goes down as we're approaching 2020 and the election?
Very bad for Trump.
So, China knows that timing and deal-making are inextricably connected.
You see President Trump do the same technique all the time.
You have to make sure that time is on your side.
The President has lost that advantage.
The President has lost the advantage of time.
That's a big deal.
He lost the advantage of time On the biggest negotiation that the United States has probably been involved in that wasn't military.
He lost the advantage of time.
China knows that.
China, again, very smart.
So why would you expect China to agree to a deal in the next two years?
The only way that China would agree to a deal in the next two years is if China is stupid.
Or they get a really good deal.
So the president is trapped.
He can either give no deal to China and run into the election with no deal.
Very bad. Or he can promise he's working on it, but since we don't have a deal, the stock market's going to be suppressed.
It's bad. Bad for the president.
If he does make a deal, He's going to have to make a deal that he doesn't want to make, and people are going to notice.
And then he's the bad dealmaker.
So China has boxed the president in really well.
And keep in mind, I try to be objective when the president has a win.
I try to be objective when he doesn't.
In this case, he doesn't.
China just got the upper hand.
They can play for time and they can say, well, you know, maybe we get Joe Biden.
Maybe we get some kind of impeachment or maybe the legal process, you know, puts the president in trouble.
Maybe the president is so desperate for a deal.
We just wait until we're six months from the election and we get the deal we want.
So at the moment, China has complete upper hand.
And they know it because that's obviously why they pulled everything out of the deal.
They basically completely reversed everything they negotiated because they probably think they don't need to.
Somebody says there's still 18 months to election.
Really, there's a year.
In which this China thing needs to get figured out.
Because if it gets close to the end, they're not going to make a deal in the last six months, unless it's a pro-China deal, which Trump can't do and still get elected.
So, here's the question I ask myself.
Why do we need a trade deal with China?
Did you ever ask yourself that?
Why do we assume that we need a trade deal?
Why can't we just... Put tariffs on anything we want to put tariffs on and just let the market sort it out.
Why do we even allow our U.S. companies to deal with Chinese companies who, by contract and by the situation, are going to steal their technology?
Why not just ban it?
Now, of course, you would have major industries in this country that would just take it in the shorts.
How about you just phase it in?
Say, we'll increase your tariffs by 2% a year until we get 25%.
Because that will give American companies time to adjust, find other markets, maybe we can use those tariffs to directly subsidize them.
I don't really understand why we need a deal.
And the president is starting to suggest something similar because he keeps saying, hey, we'll just take these tariff stuff.
I think he said China's paid $100 billion in tariffs.
I don't know if that number's real.
But the point is, do we need a deal?
Why don't we just not deal with them in places that are unfair and charge massive tariffs in other places?
I just don't know why we need a deal at all.
So, here's a topic I was talking about the other day that I had a little insight into, and I couldn't figure a way through it.
I've been asking, why is it that the US and Russia are, let's say, not enemies, but each other's nemesis?
And I was saying, what in the world would make those two countries want to feel like we're at war footing or we're poking each other with our clandestine operations, etc.
Just why? Why Russia?
And why are we not doing it to France?
Now, I understand it's happening, and I understand Russia does bad things, and I'm sure we do some things to them.
But I came to one point Realization that just made me think, oh, I get it now.
I want to see it in the comments before I say it.
Does anybody in the comments know why Russia would not want to be exactly friends with the United States?
Here's my best guess.
Russia has two industries that are not lame.
Most of their industries are pathetic.
But they have energy, oil, etc.
Now, it can't be good for Russia, in terms of their oil business, to be at odds with the United States.
Because it seems like they could sell more oil if they were just friendly with everybody, right?
So I thought oil is probably not the answer.
Oil might be part of it, but it just seems to me that Russia would sell a lot more oil if they just decided to be everybody's friend.
Who sells more oil than people who are not your enemies, right?
Well, you know what I mean.
There we go. Somebody got the right answer in the comments.
Armaments. Weapons.
The other major industry for Russia is weapons.
And they sell them to all the countries that don't buy them from the United States, or we won't sell them to the United States.
The Russian government, I've come to understand, should be seen more like a criminal organization that just has a government as a structure, with Putin ahead of the criminal organization.
Because you assume that these two major industries, you have to assume that both the defense and the energy industry are really just funneling money into Putin's bank account one way or the other.
I think that's fair to say.
So let me ask you this.
What would happen if Russia decided to be friends with everybody?
Well, suddenly, they wouldn't have as much market for the primary thing that their economy sells, other than oil, which is weapons.
They need an unstable world.
Somebody says, oh, that is a lie, Scott.
I don't know which part you're saying is a lie, but if you want to fact check me, please do.
So I'm open to any kind of fact-checking.
I'm just feeling my way around this topic, so I'm not going to make any claim that everything I say is right.
It feels to me like there's no way past the fact that Putin is a crime boss who happens to own a country, and weapons are their second biggest industry, and they're not going to give it up, and the worst thing for that industry would be a peaceful world.
So, I have to think that if we can't figure out some way to get past the fact that the Russia arms industry is their second biggest thing and they don't want a peaceful world, I don't know how you can get past that.
So if anybody has a suggestion, I've never heard one.
In fact, I've never even heard it discussed.
Have you heard anybody frame it the way I just framed it?
Yeah, and somebody's saying it's no difference between that and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
And I think that's true.
It seems that there are two competing arms industries who the last thing they want is anything that looks like peace.
So, let's talk about...
So there was a report in some publication that said 45% of Trump's campaign donations came from women.
45%. Apparently that's much higher than when he ran for president.
I think it was 29%.
So going from 29% to 45%, that's a big, big jump.
And the way it was reported is that he had the fourth...
Best percentage of contributions from women.
So if you saw that, because they're looking at all the Democrats, so they're saying that of all the candidates, Trump and all the Democrats, Trump is in fourth place in terms of getting money donated from women.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
Here's the other way to look at it.
Trump was the number one Male candidate in terms of female donations.
In other words, the only three people who beat Trump for donations were the three top female candidates on the Democrat side.
Kamal Harris, Kristen Jill Brand, and was it Warren?
I forget who it was, but there were three candidates who were women who were ahead of him.
Trump is the highest male getter of female contributions in percentage-wise.
That would have been the way to report it.
But you have to dig that out of the numbers to know that among men, he's number one.
To say that women contribute more to female candidates is not really saying a lot.
You just sort of expect that.
But to say that of all the other men, Women are preferring, or at least in terms of their pocketbooks, they're preferring Trump above the other men in terms of donations.
All right. I'm just looking at my notes here and see if I talked about everything.
Monmouth University released a poll I think Rush Limbaugh talked about this.
He said that only 10% of Americans have a positive view of socialism.
And so I guess the idea is like, oh, you know, the socialist candidates don't have a chance.
But I would caution you about that.
Because it's only the conservatives and Republicans who call what the Democrats are doing socialism.
Now, I'm exaggerating.
It's not only them. But there are no socialist candidates.
That's just something that the people on the right say.
None of the Democrats are socialists, per se.
They would like more socialist stuff within a capitalist system.
Now, they would like the capitalists to pay for, you know, healthcare and education and UBI and stuff.
But there is nobody, as far as I can tell, who's running for president who wants full socialism.
Even Bernie, if you're saying that Bernie is a socialist, you're buying into the Republican conservative brainwashing.
Bernie likes capitalism with some social safety nets.
And that's very clear.
I don't believe Bernie has, at least in his running for president life, has never suggested an end of capitalism, except in those categories where he would like some more fairness.
Now, I'm not supporting those views.
I've often said I've left to Bernie, except I'm better at math.
And the math is hard to work for the things that Bernie wants.
So I tend to think that capitalism can deliver what socialism promises.
But if you find yourself getting happy that only 10% of Americans have a positive view of socialism, Keep in mind that they don't think the Democrats are socialists.
It's a completely irrelevant fact.
It feels like it's a kill shot.
You look at it and you go, oh, if only 10% like socialism, the president's going to clean the field with all these socialists.
Well, first of all, it could be Biden and it could be Kamala Harris, and I'm not sure how socialist they really are when it comes down to it.
But I wouldn't be too happy Because most of the public doesn't see what they're doing as socialism.
It just sees some elements of socialism in a capitalist system.
All right. I think that's all I was going to talk about.
Did I miss anything? Oh, did I mention North Korea?
Yeah, so I saw one report in Newsweek that North Korea may be prepping for another nuclear test.
And I read it and I just thought, oh God, you can't trust anything in the news.
Unless I see that on both sides of the news, I'm just not going to believe it's true.
Somebody says it's a kill shot that Democrats love huge government.
Nope. That's the worst persuasion ever.
Because Democrats are kind of okay with a big government.
We have a big government. They recognize the benefits.
It's, you know... The saying that Democrats like big government, that's empty, has no persuasive power whatsoever.
Yeah, so Newsweek reported that about North Korea, and I guess I'm just going to wait to see if any of that's true.
I don't even want to comment on it because the credibility of the press is so low at this point that you can't even treat it like it's true.
So I would remind you again that, oh, let's talk about all the bannings.
So, every day it seems we wake up to a new person being banned.
And I really struggle with how to deal with this.
Because I don't want to...
On one hand, I want to support free speech in all of its ways.
On the other hand, the social networks do have some responsibility for getting rid of the worst of the worst.
If there were big active pro-Nazi people on social media, would you really be against banning them?
If there were more of an ISIS recruiting element on social media, do you really want them to have complete free speech?
Some of you do, and I would respect that if you said, yes, I would give ISIS complete free speech on social media.
I can respect that, but you can also see that reasonable people might want to Not do that.
So I'm trying to be not the automatically go to one side or the other.
And as I'm watching people get banned, I'm feeling like there needs to be some kind of line because everybody's worried about the slippery slope.
If the only thing that ever happened were 20 personalities on the right were banned from social media, would it make any difference?
If you imagined that the banning of conservative, right-leaning, dangerous voices, whether it's Alex Jones or anybody else, if you imagined that they got, say, the top 20 or 50 of the ones that have some argument, whether you agree with it or not, but there's some argument that they've crossed the line, would it make any difference to you?
It would make a big difference to those people, and I think there should be some kind of mechanism for a check on that.
I'd love to see some kind of a legal process where people can appeal their suspensions.
So I think that just has to happen.
The government needs to force it if these social media companies can't work out some kind of an arbitration thing that gives people a second chance.
Some kind of an amnesty thing where maybe you have a timeout, maybe you get your account back, but maybe it's more controlled than it was before.
It should be some kind of a second chance act for social media.
And we just did this first step act earlier.
For real prison.
And the idea was that you'd rather rehabilitate people than to keep them, you know, in a permanent underclass.
So why not have something like that for social media?
But I ask you this question. Is it really gonna matter to your life or anybody else's if the total number of people who were ever banned is 20 to 50?
I just don't know that it makes any difference.
Now, Again, you want them to be good reasons.
You like to have a process where they can work it out.
But there's probably some kind of middle ground here that's going to work pretty well.
But let me say that there needs to be a red line.
So each of you need to have in your mind what a red line would look like.
Like, who do you know that is a little bit edgy, a little bit edgy, But if they got banned, you would say, that's it for me.
That's my red line.
If you ban somebody who's that harmless, it's one thing to ban Alex Jones, because there's nobody really like Alex Jones.
And by the way, I don't think he should be banned, because the things they accuse him of are either...
Well, I don't want to get into it, but the point is...
That he doesn't seem like the dangerous type to me, as long as, you know, there's opposing opinions that can balance things out.
But do you have in your mind a person who is the line too far?
Who is that person?
Now, if you're saying me, I don't quite think, you know, I think I'm so far down the list of people who are likely to be banned.
Tim Pool, there's a good one.
Because Tim Pool is an independent.
Tucker, I don't even know if he runs his own Twitter.
So I'm not sure that Tucker has anything but corporate people or assistants doing his social media.
I don't really know the situation there.
But I doubt he would get banned.
So people are saying James Woods.
Yeah, I think the James Woods situation is a perfect test case for why there should be arbitration.
Because there was a reason, apparently, for James Woods getting banned.
There was a specific thing he did, which reasonable people could look at and say, Oh my God, that's too far.
What other reasonable people could look at and say, This is just a movie reference.
Nobody's hanging anybody.
So I would say that's the perfect case of somebody who maybe gets a little warning, gets a little arbitration, gets back on the system.
That's exactly what should happen with James Woods.
Now, I do think that saying things like people should be hung on the other team is something you should do less of, because it is a call to violence, even if you didn't intend it.
And I am sure that James Woods did not mean The actual violence outside of the legal system.
I'm sure he was not recommending any actual violence.
But could people see it that way?
Could people who follow him say, I think he means it literally.
Is there any of his many, many followers who would have looked at, hang them all, and thought to themselves, just any of them, 5%, 2%, would any of them look at that and say, Yeah, I'm going to buy me a rope.
Start hanging some people.
Yes. The answer is yes.
So if you're okay with that, free speech and all, I think you could be okay with it.
We have to know there's a price.
Stop pretending the purges are not intentional.
Am I pretending the purges are not intentional?
There's no question that there's more of it on one side.
So I don't think anybody's...
I don't believe anybody thinks that it's balanced.
So I'm certainly not going to argue that whatever they're doing to people on the left is balanced by other extremists on the left.
I'm not seeing any evidence of that.
You know, throwing in one...
What's his name?
Farrakhan? Throwing in Farrakhan, that certainly helps their argument.
But he's just one guy.
Sticks. Mind reading much, am I? No one believes in hanging anything, right?
Joe Rogan, Nolte, Ben Shapiro.
Yeah, I mean, there would be one.
If you saw Ben Shapiro get banned on social media, that would definitely be too far.
That would be way too far.
So, anyway, keep in your mind, I would say it would be useful to hold in your mind some real people who, if they were to get banned and you were to look at their activities and it wasn't the worst thing in the world, that you would say to yourself, this is too far. Somebody's saying Crowder.
I don't really know Crowder's content entirely.
I've seen a few clips and stuff.
So, I don't have an opinion on him, but that might, in your case, that might be your red line.
Alright. The word hang makes it not a real threat.
Well, I'm going to say what I say on a fairly regular basis.
If you take a hundred Americans and show them any message...
You're not going to get 100 opinions on the same side.
It doesn't matter what you show to 100 Americans, some of them will interpret it differently.
So it doesn't matter that 98% would hear the phrase, hang them high and just know it's hyperbole.
You're worried about the two.
And that's real. People could be influenced that way.
They banned David Horowitz, but I believe they reversed that ban as a mistake.
Candace Owens.
Yeah, if Candace Owens got banned, that would be too far.
Stephan is right on that edge.
Has he been banned before?
Jordan Peterson, I don't think there's any risk of him being banned, but that would definitely be too far.
Sticks, I don't know enough of his content to have an opinion on that, but I don't know him to be provocative in a way that he would get banned.
Alright, so somebody says we're already past the line.
I think we are with James Woods.
So we're definitely past the line, but we're also in the fog of war.
Does anybody know if James Woods is permanently banned?
Is he permanently banned or is he just on some kind of suspension?
Because if it's just a suspension, I just don't feel the same about it.
I just can't get worked up about a 30-day suspension for a reason that would make him and other people say, oh, maybe I won't use language like let's shoot them all.
Maybe I shouldn't use language like hang them or firing squad because somebody might misunderstand it.
I don't know. So does anybody know the answer to that question?
So is Kathy Griffin banned?
Well, here's the thing.
If you were by trade a comedian, and you're making sort of an ISIS reference by showing a severed head, as inappropriate as that was, it's pretty obvious that was a joke.
Now, could you put that in the same category as James Woods saying, hang them?
I think so. I think that would be a reasonably good test to see if there's something balanced happening.
Donald Trump Jr.
Yeah, if Twitter banned Donald Trump Jr., I think the world would explode.
Yeah, talk about a line too far.
That would really be a line too far.
I mean, there aren't too many things that would get me in the street, but that might.
Scott, provocative cannot be a reason.
You know this. Yes, I do.
But provocative and inciting danger, inciting violence, are very different.
Nick Monroe, I don't know what content got banned.
So, I guess the problem is that we never quite know What the content is that's getting people banned, or is it the...
In Twitter's case, they talk about the activity, not the content.
And we never really know.
So we as observers never quite know.
All right. Roseanne...
I don't know. It suppresses free speech to suspend people.
Yeah, of course it does. Yeah, nobody's arguing that social media is a place for free speech.
Are they? I don't think anybody's arguing that complete free speech.
Let me ask you this.
If there were a robust Nazi party in another country, would we first of all allow them to immigrate?
I don't know that we would.
So certainly thought crimes and opinion crimes are real things that we do treat as seriously.
It's not that he should be banned, it's that others do get banned.
Yeah, I think the Kathy Griffin example is completely valid.
If you could explain to me the difference between Kathy Griffin's tweet and James Wood's tweet, that would be interesting.
But there could be a very simple explanation.
Would you like to hear it?
The very simple explanation for why Kathy Griffin would be treated differently than James Wood's Is that Kathy Griffin's happened when the standard was different.
It seems to me that the social media companies are intentionally tightening the standards, so you should see people who are doing things more recently get banned, but you probably will never see somebody who did something three years ago get banned.
Nor do you really want that to happen.
So you could certainly say, why do you allow a Kathy Griffin but not allow a James Woods?
But you have to account for the fact that one happened a while ago.
And the social media companies are quite visible.
About the fact that they're playing with their algorithms for deciding who's banned or not.
So we know that they're experimenting with that.
They're tightening it up. They're trying to get rid of the unhealthy language.
So you should expect more bans today than you saw three years ago.
So that part doesn't tell you anything.
All right. Nazis are specifically banned.
Interesting. Congressperson Omar.
What would be an example of anything Omar said that created danger?
It's sort of a risky business to say that anti-Israel propaganda or even pro-Israel propaganda are pushing violence.
I don't know that you can ever slice that fine enough to have a rule that you can live with.
Because anything that is either pro or anti-Israel promotes violence.
Am I wrong? If you said something bad about Israel, you might be promoting violence against Jews.
If you say something positive about Israel, somebody's going to say you're promoting violence against Palestinians.
So I don't know that you could ever enforce anything about criticism about countries.
Somebody says, why do you not like Nazis, but are okay with Muslim beliefs that hurt and kill women?
Did I say anything that sounded like that?
I didn't say anything that sounded like that.
I am against...
Well, let me give you some context.
I believe that ideas, in some cases, could reasonably be treated like infections.
Meaning that there are some ideas that are not like other ideas.
Some ideas are infections, meaning that they're going to spread to other people and cause them to act in ways that are bad for somebody's health.
That's what an infection is.
An infection can spread to other people and it can cause outcomes that are bad for people's health.
So we would easily quarantine a large group of people who do not have an infection just to make sure that nobody with the infection gets through.
The so-called ban on the various countries that don't have good records, that are mostly but not entirely Muslim countries, is because we're treating it like a health problem.
There are people within that group, and we don't know which ones, who are likely to have ideas that are infectious and dangerous to health.
So, in that case, much like the Nazi ban, because you don't know which...
Let me put it this way.
If there were a nation of Nazis, there would almost certainly, almost certainly How do I say this without getting quoted in the context?
I'll give it some context.
If you had a nation of complete Nazis, people who were literally signed up and wore the Nazi uniforms and everything, you could guarantee that some percentage of them are just playing along and don't like Nazis at all.
So you would also keep all of them out of the country because you can't tell.
If it's a country of Nazis, you can say, alright, the whole country can't come in.
Because I don't know how to sort the ones who are just playing along because they would be killed in their own country.
They don't believe any of this philosophy, but they're just pretending.
They're just wearing the outfits, carrying the flags, because they'll be killed if they don't.
You couldn't sort them out, so you would have to, as a practical matter, treat it like a health problem.
You would quarantine the entire category unfairly, You would absolutely be discriminating against people who did not have bad intentions, but were in a bad situation or a bad category.
And the president has made the same kind of health-related decision about several countries where we can't check the health of the people coming in.
And when I mean health, I mean do they have the mental health ideas that are both infectious and dangerous to other people's health.
And radical Islamic philosophies would be infectious and they would be dangerous to people's health.
So if you can't tell which one of the group has that Luckily, we don't have to ban all Muslims from all countries, which would be far worse.
But there are some countries where we just can't sort out the good ones from the bad ones with any reliable accuracy.
Alright, that's all I've got to say.
I'm babbling at this point.
I'm going to go do something else.
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