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June 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:06
Episode 567 Scott Adams: Limpet Mines, Flag Burning, Brainwashing, UFOs, Reparation H
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Hey everybody!
How are all of you?
Come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip.
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It's where you get that little dopamine advantage that will carry you through the rest of the day.
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It starts with the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
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A cup or a glass or a mug, a tank or a stein or a chalice, possibly a thermos, maybe a flask, any kind of a vessel that holds a liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
So in a little bit, I'm going to have a guest on here, which is why I have my fancy headset on.
Looking quite professional, I like to think.
And while I'm waiting for the guest to join, and by the way, Tom, if you're looking at how to join, if you haven't done this before, you should be on a mobile device because it only works on mobile.
It will not work on your laptop.
And look for the little happy faces icon at the bottom of your screen.
And that is how you request to join.
And I see somebody has requested to join.
Let's see if that is Tom.
Not yet. Okay. So, let's talk about a few other things while we're waiting for that.
Oh, the fun, the fun today.
So, There's an article in National Review by Kevin Williamson in which he said a number of things are not real and people ask my opinion.
And the things that Kevin Williamson labels as not real are things such as cults and stuff that Freud said and recovered memories and brainwashing.
So, Kevin's saying that those things are not real.
Now, I agree with him on most of these things.
I see Tom is here, and we'll get to him as soon as I finish these comments.
I agree with most of those comments.
I'll tell you what I agree with and what I don't.
I agree that calling one thing a cult and another thing a religion...
Doesn't make sense.
Because the difference between a cult and a religion, that's more of an opinion.
And so I would agree with him that labeling some things cults, you can't really justify that.
A religion that you don't believe in looks like a cult to you.
He says recovered memories are not real.
I believe that is correct.
I believe that... The stories of recovered memories are really stories of people imagining things and talking themselves into thinking they're true.
But, and then he also says that a lot of the beliefs about Freud and the Freudian analysis are also based on no science.
And that's true too. Freud was, we know now, a fraud.
But here's where we disagree.
He says there's no such thing as brainwashing, but he's careful to say brainwashing as it is popularly described in movies and popular culture.
So his definition might be a little restricted and maybe that's why he says it doesn't exist.
But I say Brainwashing absolutely exists.
All right, remember, I don't know what Kevin Williamson's background is, but I'm a trained hypnotist.
I have hypnotized people, and I can tell you that you can change people's preferences.
And what is a person if not a bundle of preferences?
Because you're not your memory, exactly.
Because you could put your memory in your phone, and that doesn't make your phone you.
So you're not your memory, you're not your body, because you could lose an arm, but you're still you.
You are largely the thing that makes you special, besides your genetic makeup, is your preferences.
And those can be fairly easily changed by other people.
So do you call that brainwashing?
Well, here's the thing.
Kevin Williamson already said that recovered memories are not real.
If a recovered memory is not real, what happened to the person who had the recovered memory?
They were brainwashed.
So, not intentionally, but a person with a recovered memory is usually a memory that has been, let's say, installed by the person asking the questions.
So, for example, in the famous case of the McMartin preschool, the law enforcement people asked questions of the children in a way that were sort of leading questions that would cause them to believe they had a memory they didn't have.
So that's a well-documented case where the police brainwashed children.
They brainwashed them into thinking they had experiences they never had.
Very common. Wouldn't you say that Trump derangement syndrome is based entirely on brainwashing?
It is. Most of what you see as politics is actually just brainwashing.
It's not one side.
If you think the other side is brainwashing and the side that you happen to join was the one that doesn't do any brainwashing, I'm sorry.
You don't understand much about how the world works.
Everybody's being brainwashed all the time.
It influences us in different ways, different people.
But you're all being brainwashed.
Pretty much, as I've said before, try to find somebody in the real world who has a political opinion that doesn't match the news network they watch.
It's rare. People get their opinions assigned to them and then they believe it's their opinions.
It becomes their opinions.
But brainwashing is the...
I would say the opposite of brainwashing doesn't exist.
I'm going to say as opposite of that as possible.
Almost everything you believe is assigned to you.
So you are mostly a brainwashed creature.
Mostly. We're probably 90% brainwashing and 10% genetics and randomness and stuff like that.
So that's my take on it.
Now, let's see if we can bring Tom on here.
I made you wait long enough.
All right. Tom, can you hear me?
Terrific. Tom, can you help me with the pronunciation of your last name?
Sauer. Tom Sauer.
Sauer. S-A-U-E-R. That's correct.
And I understand you have some experience with mines and demolition.
Can you tell us your experience?
Because this is relative to the Iranian...
And the tanker situation.
That's correct. I am a former Navy EOD officer.
EOD stands for Explosive Ordnance Disposal.
We're the bomb squad for the Navy and for special operations.
So you've seen limpet mines, the kind that are allegedly being used on these tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
Is that correct? That is, generally speaking, that's correct.
I can't speak to the specific mine that was used there, but generally speaking, yes, we trained on those and we're familiar with them.
So the first thing I'd ask is, you saw the videos, the grainy videos of what is allegedly an Iranian, maybe a Revolutionary Guard boat, removing something from the hull.
Would you say, based on your experience, that is probably a limpet mind, definitely a limpet mind, or how would you characterize that?
See, it's hard to say because I did see the photos from USS Bainbridge, which was on scene.
They took some photographs and put that out.
It was part of the official Navy statement, and they showed the blast from one, and they showed another black object.
I can't tell for sure.
I mean, it seems like it would have been, but what threw me off was watching these guys come up in the boat And it looks like they're doing something right in the same spot where the other picture had that alleged limpet mine.
Right. And the thing is, is that we look at this and look, I acknowledge that there's other nations of smaller countries or less developed countries and their military and their EOD forces are very limited in their capability, in their training, their what we call TTPs, tactics, training procedures.
And so we look at that, and I'm looking like, well, that's just the day one, you don't do that, right?
That's like the first day is you don't walk up on something that's armed, even if it's dud fired, right?
Okay, assuming it misfired and didn't work correctly.
Well, what that tells you is that, well, that piece of ordinance, and this is whether it's a limpet mine, a hand grenade, an IED, whatever, it doesn't matter, is like, okay, that thing's angry, right?
Right? And the thing is, if you go and put your hands on that thing, or worse, even approach it, that's just like a big, big no-no.
That's why we have robots, right?
And, you know, that's why you see in the movies and everything, we send a robot in, and that's why we have a guy wearing a bomb suit.
And furthermore, if you have to send somebody downrange, you don't put a boat with a dozen guys on it, like a little boat.
And so that's why I initially just questioned this.
I'm looking at this like, okay, this is either not a limp at mine or these guys are really, really dumb.
And like, look, you don't have to have a whole lot of training or any training.
You don't have to be an UD guy to figure, hey, let's have this boat full of a dozen guys.
We're all going to stand on the bow and stand around it while Ahmed, you know, goes and puts his hands on the thing and yanks it off.
Well, let me ask you this.
Have you accounted for any cultural differences?
In other words, would it be culturally, let's say, acceptable for the people who were not the ones actually reaching up to this alleged limpid mind, would it be acceptable for them to be cowering in fear at the back of the boat?
You know, that's a good question I hadn't thought of.
And, you know, if that's the case for another country or another culture, if they want to do that, they can go and have that part of their culture, as far as I'm concerned.
But anybody else, you know, if they said, hey, we're all going to go up here, I would say, can I transfer over to the other boat?
Did it look to you as though there was any place to hide on that small boat?
I mean, was there even a...
I don't remember it clearly.
Did it even have a below deck?
It was a hendaging clasp patrol boat, which is real common.
I spent a fair bit of time out there, and those are pretty common.
You see those guys all the time.
I've interacted with the IRGCN a lot, and I can tell you some funny stories about those guys.
They point rockets at us.
They call us up on the radio and say obscene things to us.
They play pornography on the radio to just try to mess with our heads.
They're real friendly. But the thing is, on that boat, at least go to the other side, maybe?
You know what I mean? Your best run against an explosion isn't actually armor, it's distance.
Alright, but...
But you get my point.
If they thought that there was nothing they could do to be particularly safe, they might just say, well, we're not going to act like we're a bunch of cowards.
We'll just stand up here and see what happens.
Yeah, in solidarity with their buddies, I suppose you could say that.
Maybe that is a cultural thing, perhaps, but that's what I thought.
When I was looking at this, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense.
However, when I saw some of these other photos and It's worth pointing out, yesterday, the New York Times column about it, and I was actually in the middle of writing on the same topic for Human Events for Will Chamberlain and Rahim Kassam.
I was in the middle of writing for that because I was asking a lot of these questions.
But then there's a New York Times column that came up and it actually had some, it looks like they changed the filter on the video footage.
You can see a little bit more clearly.
And it really does, like, wow, okay, maybe they just were that dumb.
And they actually did do what I didn't think that they would.
And it looked like they actually did it.
Well, keep in mind that if they got the order to do this and they didn't do it, you know, they're sort of dead.
They got two ways to be dead.
And this one was the low, this one was probably the low-risk path.
Probably. And they were just being kind of, you know, maybe they just decided, hey, we're just going to be Really stupid about it, and if we're going to stand around, you know, I'm sure they probably had to change and do a lot of laundry afterwards, because I would have been pissing my pants if I had to do that.
Now, in your opinion, having seen what you've seen, is there any chance that it isn't exactly what it looks like, which is the Revolutionary Guard put some mines on some ships?
Is there any chances anything but that?
Good question. It seems like, you know, one thing we do learn in EOD is that, you know, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
I mean, it really is. Just kind of like, you know, use the Occam's razor approach.
I have thought about if there's something nefarious going on.
I mean, yeah, I guess it's possible, but I mean, I know what that boat is.
That is an IRGCM boat.
You can tell from...
You know, just from the footage there, even though it's not color and doesn't have markings, you can't see the markings at least, that is an Iranian patrol boat.
Now, if there was something else on there and not an explosive device, I mean, maybe, but probably not.
Yeah, why would it be? Yeah, why would it be?
And also, it's worth pointing out that the Iranians know, they know that we had our eyes on everything in the area.
It says that they shot down or tried to shoot down one of our surveillance drones.
We also had, you know, other, whenever we have that entire part of the world mapped out, we're watching everything.
And especially after an incident like that, there are multiple cameras on scene 24 hours a day.
You have surveillance aircraft and surveillance drones.
So they had to know that they were being watched.
And the Iranians know this, too.
Here's what I've been watching for.
I've been watching for the Iranians to specifically deny that that, would you call it a ship or a boat?
What's the proper? A patrol boat, a PB. A boat?
Yeah, a boat. I've been looking for them to say, that's not our boat.
Because if they don't say, that's not our boat, as ridiculous as that might sound to us, if they can't say that directly, it's their freaking boat.
Oh, it is definitely their boat, for sure.
And if they haven't denied it, there you go.
Now, let me ask you this.
I don't know if you know enough about the politics in Iran.
You probably study that area more than I do.
But what are the odds that the Revolutionary Guard could be acting somewhat independently from even the rest of the civilian government?
What are the odds that the president of Iran, who, of course, is subsidiary, you know, he's subservient to the The grand leader of the Ayatollah.
What are the chances that the civilian leader even knows necessarily what's happening?
That's actually possible, and I'll tell you why.
Iran has two navies.
People maybe don't realize it.
You have the Iranian Navy, which is actually a professional force with, I mean, where they follow the rules.
They're actually very professional when it comes to interacting with American ships.
They have P-3, you know, observation aircraft that I've been flown over.
They've flown over me a bunch.
And they're actually, like, uniform, professional...
You know, they act like adults, so to speak, right?
Then you have another Navy, which is called the IRGCN, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, which is a paramilitary outfit.
It is pretty much siloed off from the rest of the Iranian military.
It's strictly for political purposes, and they're the ones who are the troublemakers.
They're in the little boats.
They also do things like they ride around in Boston whalers with machine gun mounts and rocket launchers welded onto them.
And they're a different animal, and they do answer to different bosses.
So that is possible.
Now, is the Revolutionary Guard, is their primary job to protect the leaders from the populations?
their own population? Is that their primary goal?
That would be speculation.
I'll be honest. I took a Middle Eastern studies class when I was at the Naval Academy, and that's about it.
I'm not going to pretend to be a Middle East expert, but generally speaking, I'd say that's true.
It's very much a political paramilitary unit.
They're not the same as the regular military.
Somebody's challenging me in the comments that President Rouhani had to know what was going on.
Let me modify my speculation, too.
I don't know that he was necessarily in on the planning of it.
But if you watch the same video we did, yes, of course he knows they did it.
Of course he knows now.
But I don't necessarily think he knew before it happened.
I think that's a fair speculation.
I think that'd be a fair speculation, yeah.
I mean, but obviously we don't know.
Nobody knows. None of us were there.
But I mean, from what we're seeing now, I think that's a pretty – that's fair.
That's reasonable. I heard that they fired at one of our drones.
They fired a missile at our drone, and then you read down the article, and it says the closest the missile came to our drone was a kilometer.
And I'm thinking – I'm not really worried about the Iranian military now.
It's the closest they could get to a drone.
And, you know, drones not moving that fast, right?
No, they're not. And that's absolutely a very good point when they're shooting at it.
They're not very effective at those sorts of things.
One thing I would say to people watching, you can find this on open source.
I'm not giving anything away.
If we were to really start to schwack Iran, we really wanted to hurt them and it's going all out, which I still think is highly unlikely.
But your tell for that will not be, oh, we moved more carrier strike groups and more ships into the Persian Gulf.
No, no, no, no, no.
What's going to happen is when every Navy asset gets out of the Persian Gulf, because that means the U.S. Air Force is coming in and there won't be.
And the only thing of the Iranian Navy that's left, but that's still floating, will be what the U.S. Air Force decides to allow to be floating.
I can tell you that right now.
Watch that. And you can find it on open source.
I mean, that's no big secret.
So if all of a sudden you hear about the US Navy getting out of the Persian Gulf, that's where you watch out.
So, but that also raises a question I've been wondering.
It feels to me like, sure, it's great to have a Navy, because all the reasons that you would need one, but if you ever got into a real war, wouldn't 100% of every major naval vessel be sunk?
I mean, on both sides?
Let's say we got into a war with a serious country, with a serious military.
Like China. Yeah, I mean, not that we would.
Wouldn't it be about one week before everything that floated is not floating anymore on both sides?
It very well could be.
It would be a modern naval engagement these days would be very short and very violent.
Right, there wouldn't be anything left, I think.
Probably not. Well, not a lot left.
We would take some licks, but we'd deliver them back, too.
That was something I actually worked on as part of my part-time job.
One of my staff jobs, I was a planning officer.
We wrote war plans.
Actually, part of the war plan for Korea has my fingerprints on it.
A very tiny part. One of the staff got.
Somebody in the comments says, what about submarines?
Yeah, the submarines would be tougher.
It would be, but here's the interesting thing.
For Iran, one thing to note is there aren't that...
It isn't a very big area for submarine activity because it's very closely confined.
I mean, the Persian Gulf is not that big.
Yeah. And also the water's very shallow overall.
It's very shallow water, so there's not a lot of place for you to hide or run around.
There are some submarines out there, obviously some smaller ones.
We can get into that. Jack Posobiec and I have talked about that at length.
But, yeah, that's one of the things as well, that it wouldn't be too much of a submarine fight.
There is a possibility for that.
But also the real concern is in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, is if the Iranians were to mine it.
And they do have a lot of mines. That's one of the things we always worry about all the time, because they can stop all that shipping traffic.
And it doesn't even take one mine to stop all that shipping traffic.
That's why everyone gets so nervous. All the Iranians have to do is start throwing barrels into the water, and people would start freaking out.
Now, what is the situation with the Iranian?
Don't they have their own need for shipping?
In other words, if all shipping stopped, wouldn't Iran be in a lot of trouble?
It would hurt everybody.
That's one of the reasons why they haven't done anything like that yet.
They're very careful about some of these things, which also made me call into question, what do the Iranians have to gain by doing this, really?
I'm not really sure.
If anything, this will just provoke Iran.
It's more provocative and it doesn't really seem to help them at all.
I found it interesting that the Arab states all of a sudden got real fired up.
You know, say, you know, America, we got to do something, you know, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
Who benefits out of this?
So this is what makes me think that Iran might be a bit fractured at the moment.
I've got a feeling that they're not all on board with whatever's happening there.
It's just a feeling. That's a good feeling to have.
I think you might be right.
All right. Well, so, Tom, here's some persuasion I've been working on to help us with Iran.
I previewed it in my earlier question.
What kind of country needs a military to protect its leaders from its own population?
And that's sort of what the Revolutionary Guard is, in my opinion, right?
Yeah, generally speaking, I'd say that's correct, yeah.
So, I would think that that would be a great framing.
Because instead of making it the United States against Iran, it's pretty clear that we're on the same side as the population of Iran, because we both have the military between us and the leadership of Iran, which is not helping.
Either they're citizens or anybody else.
So, in a way, we have a common enemy, and it's the Revolutionary Guard.
I would agree with that.
I think that is good.
And, I mean, there's been attempts, you know, I mean, there was an attempt at a revolution, you know, another revolution, counter-revolution, what, 2013, I think it was, several years ago?
They've tried for that as well, and, I mean, it's too bad, the state of Iran.
It's such incredible potential coming out of that country.
Yeah. Right. All right, Tom, thank you so much for that.
Thank you so much, Scott.
All right, take care. Cheers.
All right, that was great.
Let's talk about some other things.
So I was talking yesterday about how the news has not covered President Trump's incremental progress on health care.
When I say incremental process, I mean there have been a number of smaller actions by the administration that That would improve the free market mechanism of healthcare that should lower costs in the long run, increase competition, increase choice, that sort of thing.
And there was this announcement that didn't get much coverage about HRAs and something about small businesses using pre-tax dollars for healthcare.
And I was watching Dr.
Nicole Sapphire I tried to explain this on, what was it, Fox and Friends?
And it was frustrating because the topic is just too complicated to really communicate.
I think Dr.
Sapphire knew the topic, but she had to somehow, in a minute, communicate this to people who don't have the same context and background and Even when you say pre-tax dollars, if you say to the average American citizen, hey, this is pretty good because this will be pre-tax dollars, do you know what the average citizen says?
Is that important?
I mean, pre-tax?
I don't know. Is that good? Is that bad?
So that whole story about the HRAs is completely wasted.
It might be a good policy, and it might give us some good results, and someday we might look back and say, hey, I'm sure glad about that.
But I'm a small business owner.
I mean, what I do here is a small business, and I wouldn't know how to do anything differently because of this.
What did the HRA do for me?
I don't know. So it's this completely poorly communicated field.
What the administration needs is some kind of an expert On simplifying and communicating.
And if you would like me to recommend some administration, I can do that.
But you seriously need some communication people working on packaging and marketing all the things that you're doing for healthcare costs so that it's a coherent story and not a bunch of muddled complexity.
I saw a poll that says Biden is leading in terms of hypothetical matchup with President Trump.
And the way it was presented in the story was that the poll says the voters want a, quote, steady leader.
So they're looking at Joe Biden as a, quote, steady leader.
And I thought to myself, that is the best kill shot ever for Joe Biden.
Because if there's one thing you can be assured of, is that the more we see of him, The more there will be things that people will label a flip-flop, more things where he stutters and falters, more things where he has to clarify something he said.
The normal give and take of a campaign produces lots of unsteadiness.
So unsteadiness is a guaranteed outcome of pretty much anybody running for president.
There will be moments they're accused, credibly accused, of having a gaffe, saying something wrong, having to correct something, flip-flopping from their previous statements, etc.
So the last thing you want, if you're the Joe Biden campaign, the last thing you want is to hear the media labeling you as the steady candidate.
Because it's a label you can't live up to.
Nobody could. You know, Trump couldn't live up to it.
Nobody could. And I know that the study is the counter to Trump's unpredictability.
But the unpredictability is giving us pretty definite benefits at this point.
I think even critics understand, the worst Trump critics understand at this point, that the president's unpredictability has helped him in negotiations.
It's helped us unambiguously.
So that's a terrible thing.
A terrible label to put on Biden is steady because that's just going to blow up like a limpet mind.
All right, mind. George Stephanopoulos was talking to President Trump and one of the questions he asked him was about the UFOs and the alleged videos of UFOs that our military aircraft have taken.
And the President was asked if he believes.
Now keep in mind that President Trump has access to everything.
There's no such thing as information that's too confidential for the President of the United States.
So whatever we know, the President knows.
Because certainly he's asked, right?
Since the topic came up, he's certainly asked his people, well, tell me the secret stuff.
Do we have any UFOs or not?
Here was the President's response about does he believe in UFOs.
He said, do I believe it?
Not particularly.
Now, not particularly leaves him that little bit of an out, which is, well, you know, I'm not saying they don't exist.
I'm just saying I'm not particularly convinced of it.
And he's seen the stuff that we can't see.
So whatever it is that's out there that has been seen, the president has looked at it and said, not particularly.
Now, if there's one thing you should trust the president on, it's identifying BS. Because when you happen to be a manufacturer of as much BS as any politician, but this president's better at it than most, let's call it hyperbole.
If you're a One of the best manufacturers of, let's say, hyperbole.
You can kind of recognize it when other people are doing it.
You can recognize BS if you are a BSer.
And when the president, who has access to the best information in the world on the question of UFOs, says, do you believe it?
Not particularly. I am in the same camp.
No matter how many videos you show...
Of what looks like a grainy picture of a UFO, I don't believe it.
Now the most famous one is that one that seemed to be traveling at a high speed and it looks like they locked onto it and at one point it looks like it turned sideways and it was still moving.
That sideways turn is what tells me it wasn't real.
Do you know the video I'm talking about?
There's one where there's a craft that looks like it's going this way, and then at some point it turns this way and it keeps going.
And I'm thinking to myself, that's exactly how nobody ever made a craft.
There's no aircraft that works well in one direction, but also works in the sideways direction.
Because you got air, you got issues with that, right?
So I don't believe that UFOs...
I don't believe UFOs have visited us.
That's my take.
Nor do I believe we'll ever find them.
But that's a longer question.
Let's talk about burning the flag.
Oh no, let's talk about Reparation H. So somebody on the internet, and I wish I could give credit because it's pretty funny...
I was given a name to Kamala Harris because Kamala believes in reparations.
Her last name starts with H, Harris.
But she also believes in hoaxes.
One of them is the fine people hoax and several other hoaxes she believes in.
So somebody gave her the name Reparation H. And I thought to myself, I like that.
That's a keeper. Because Reparation H... Just is funny, so that's good.
If it's funny, that's a good start.
But funny isn't enough. If the H stands for hoax, it signals people that she's someone who believes in every hoax.
And if you use reparation H, use the H for hoax, not for Harris.
That's what I would advise you.
And the reason is, if you use the H for hoax, then every time she mentions one, You will be reminded of it and it will be reinforcing.
That's what the president does with his nicknames.
He picks things which will be reinforcing in the normal scheme of things.
You know it will be reinforced by events.
So the hoax one would definitely be reinforced.
So she has tweeted once again the fine people hoax.
Here's what's interesting.
I, of course, retweeted that and called out the fact that she was repeating a hoax.
When I used to do that, I would just be trashed in the statements, people saying, my God, how can you say this is a hoax?
Today, when I retweet it, only a few people say, hey, why are you calling that a hoax?
I'm sure that happened.
And far more people are saying, okay, yes, here comes another hoax.
So I believe that the weight has turned.
That the people who believe it's true are now on the defensive, as they should be.
Let's talk about flag burning.
So there's some amendment, or there's some legislation floating around in which, I guess, Senator Steve Daines proposed an amendment for a strong ban on burning our American flag.
And the president supported that in a tweet and called it a no-brainer.
And other people supported him.
Candace Owens, for example, said, if I were president, the punishment for burning the U.S. flag would be the renunciation of citizenship.
That's pretty drastic.
No jail time, no fine.
Simply one year to liquidate your assets and get the hell out of our country.
That's pretty harsh.
Candace, you're badass.
In exchange, we'd extend citizenship to a hardworking legal immigrant.
So I would say that Candace and the President are both doing something that is politically very smart.
So I'm going to take two positions.
One is, does it work politically?
Does it work as a persuasion element?
And then secondly, is it a good law?
As a citizen, what do I think of it?
As persuasion, it's kind of brilliant because it forces the other team to argue in favor of burning the flag just so they can disagree with the president and so Candace is you know one of the smarter operators in the political world and I'm sure she understands that it's it's a it's a diabolical trap for the other side which by the way I haven't seen them fall into the trap yet so maybe they recognize the trap But even if you don't exactly agree with Candace,
and even if you don't exactly agree with the president that such things should be illegal, and I don't, you have to appreciate what it does politically to the other side.
It traps them in the corner and makes them argue the thing they don't want to argue, which is, hey, let's have everybody burning that flag.
Now, I have a nuanced and superior opinion on this than everybody else.
That's what everybody says on this topic.
The thing about flag burning is it's such a simple topic.
It's one of the few topics that we can all understand all of the variables.
That's very rare.
You know, normally there's something we don't understand about any big topic.
But this one, no question, every person looking at it knows All of the details you need.
So this is just an opinion. So here's my nuanced opinion, which I tweeted at the President.
I said, I respectfully disagree.
I said, the flag's burnability is exactly what makes it indestructible.
I'll get back to that. I'll only pledge allegiance to a flag I can burn in public.
No weak flags, please.
Now, dumb people read my tweet and said, Scott, it looks like you want to burn a flag.
No. No.
I don't want to burn a flag.
Scott, it looks like you'd be in favor of people burning flags.
No. No.
I'm not in favor of people burning flags.
Scott, it looks like you'd be okay with a flag burning.
No. No. No, I'm not okay with it.
I don't like it.
I don't want to see it.
I wish there were no flag burnings.
Can we agree on that?
Can we accept that and move on?
But flag is a symbol.
Flag is not a bunch of cloth.
If my symbol of freedom, the flag, if I can't burn it, it's not a symbol of freedom.
So a flag you can't burn, in my view of things, the moment you tell me I can't burn it, I don't respect it.
You get that, right?
Because free speech and the freedoms that the flag represents are up here.
These are maximum important concepts.
The material of the flag, the fact that somebody's doing something that bothers you, It's very offensive, right?
I think everybody here would be offended on some level, some a little bit, some more.
If you served in the military, the level of offense would be probably through the roof.
But being offended, I think everyone would agree that being offended is sort of down in the weeds of importance.
You're offended, I'm offended, we're all offended every day about something.
That's a small ball.
What's important?
Freedom of speech.
Freedom. That's important.
So if you tell me you're going to take away my freedom, the top-level important thing, freedom of speech in this case, if you're going to take that away from me to protect a piece of cloth, I'm going to find myself a new country.
I'm going to find myself a country that gives me freedom of speech.
Because I want the flag that gets stronger when it gets burned.
I want the anti-fragile flag.
I want the one that the worst people in the world can take out into the center of the square and desecrate in every possible horrible way they want to desecrate it, and that those people, assuming they clean up the litter, I mean, there might be a question of litter, but as long as those people can walk away and not go to jail, that's the country I want to live in, even while I don't like those people for doing what they did, even while I'm personally offended by it.
I need to live in that country.
So that's the high level.
I think that's the high ground on this.
So let me reread my sentence because it will make more sense now that I've explained it.
So what I said in my tweet was the flag's burnability is exactly what makes it indestructible.
As long as we can burn it, it's indestructible.
The minute we can't burn it, it's dead to me.
It's weak and it's dead.
The minute I can't set it on fire.
But if you let me set it on fire anywhere I want in this country, as long as I'm not littering, as long as I'm not, you know, as long as I'm not breaking some other unrelated law, as long as I can do that, you've got yourself an indestructible symbol.
Can't be destroyed if I can burn it.
All right, that's my opinion. Now, with the flag-burning stuff, I'm open to the fact that this is just how people feel about stuff and if you feel strongly about it, you know, for example, if you were in the military and you say to me, you know, I hear what you're saying, Scott, I understand it, you know, in the, you know, sort of blah-blah, intellectual way you're saying it, I understand it, but I fought for this country.
If I see somebody burning a flag, I'm going to punch their lights out.
I respect that.
You still have to go to jail if you punch somebody in public But you know what you're getting, right?
If somebody fought for the country, and they've got a far more personal relationship with the symbol, and they need to take it down on somebody, I don't think you should punch people.
But I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't feel that way.
So I will respect the opinion of people who disagree with me on this topic.
All right. I think I hit all of the main points here.
Let me just check here.
I did. Those are all my main points.
How about that? Here's the other point of view on this flag burning stuff.
I told you that this summer was going to be all silly news.
So we're going to have an entire summer full of silly news.
And I think this flag burning thing fits perfectly into that.
It's just some silliness that the president is injecting because it's good for him.
It makes him the protector of the country, the protector of America, etc.
But it's not important.
It really isn't. It's the least important topic that we're going to talk about.
So we'll have a summer of fun, it looks like.
And maybe this won't be the summer of love, but it's going to be fun.
Alright, so a lot of people are asking me in the comments to say something about OJ. So if you don't know, OJ Simpson has opened his Twitter account with a little video introducing his return.
And he says he's going to be getting back at some people that said some people that said some stuff he didn't like, etc.
And here's the best part.
He wished all the fathers Happy Father's Day.
Happy Father's Day.
Oh man!
OJ, come on!
I don't want to laugh about the tragedy of a murder and the poor families that were involved.
But seriously, O.J.? Happy Father's Day?
The only thing that could have been worse than O.J. saying Happy Father's Day is O.J. saying Happy Mother's Day.
Am I right? And I don't want to make a joke of this, but this is so wrong, like so monumentally wrong that O.J. It's so wrong I just have to laugh at it because it's ridiculously wrong.
It's wrong. It's not even just, you know, wrong offensive.
It's like past offensive.
It's like whatever is the offensive times ten that you just look at and you go, well, that's just so wrong.
That's just so wrong.
Anyway, when I checked, he had a quarter of a million followers.
Up from zero in one day.
And when I checked back in a few more hours, it was well over 300,000.
So he's going to have a really interesting Twitter feed.
We'll see how long it lasts.
Scott, how's the homeless situation in your country?
Not so good, but I think we have lots of technologies and ways to fix that.
All right.
I think that's about all I've got right now.
And I think...
Oh, somebody says county. How is the homelessness in my county?
Well, I'm on the East Bay, so San Francisco is sort of a mess, if you believe the news reports.
But where I am in the East Bay, I just don't see it.
I mean, I live in an upscale community, so...
We just don't have too many problems there.
Alright, that's enough for now, and I will talk to you all later.
Make sure you see this on YouTube in the replay.
Just search for Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
You'll see it on YouTube in the replay.
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