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July 17, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:26
Episode 600 Scott Adams: Let’s Discuss a Tweet Because Everything Else Seems to be Fine
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Hey John, come on in here!
Good to see you. You know what time it is.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day.
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And it doesn't take much to enjoy this moment.
It takes very little, actually.
All it takes is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tankard, a thermos, a flask, maybe a canteen, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
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Wow. What a way to start the day.
Well, I'd like to talk about all the problems in the world first.
Okay, that was me talking about all the problems in the world.
Because it turns out there aren't any real problems in the world.
At least if you take it from the news, because the news is talking about a tweet.
That's right. The biggest news in the world is a tweet that was worded in such a way that people feel bad for other people.
When I say feel bad for other people, what I'm talking about is Anderson Cooper feeling very, very, very bad that these tweets might make other people feel bad.
That's your big problem of the day.
That's your headline news.
Somebody's tweet makes somebody else maybe feel bad.
We would ask those people to come on, but we couldn't find anybody who feels bad.
And although we couldn't find anybody who actually feels bad, we could find hundreds of people who feel bad for the people who don't feel bad.
Now, it used to be that if you did something that would make somebody feel bad, That was the story.
Somebody did something.
Somebody else feels bad.
Well, there's something to talk about.
But we don't have that anymore.
Now we have somebody does something.
Let's say it's a tweet, a provocative tweet.
And instead of people feeling bad, they really don't care one way or the other.
But there are people who feel bad for the people who should feel bad, but they don't seem to feel bad because they don't really care.
Do you know who I think was the least bothered by the go-back-home tweets from the president?
I don't know this for sure, so I'm just going to put this out here.
I think the group least bothered by the go-back-home was American black people.
I don't know that to be true, and I'm certainly not going to put myself in their heads, and I'm not going to speak for any other group.
I certainly can't do that.
But it feels to me...
Like they understood the point, which is it's not about race.
It's about loving your country and if you have a loyalty to some other country, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But moreover, it was just simple trash talk.
It wasn't even factually on point.
It was just trash talk that made people really feel bad for other people who, if you asked them, would say, eh, Do you know what I have to worry about?
A lot more things than that tweet.
That's for sure. Now, have I told you, yes I have, many times, that the way to evaluate your filter on life, let's say you're looking at the world one way and interpreting it one way, and somebody else is looking at it another way, whether it's this presidential tweet, some people say, my God, it's a racist outrage, and other people say, it's just trash talk, it's nothing.
Very different filters.
One of the things that you can do to test your filter, to see which one is the right one, is to see which one predicts better.
One of the filters predicts that the president will do a bunch of racist stuff, and that people who are good at spotting racist stuff will notice.
That's what you would imagine if you have one filter.
The other filter says, no, you're just imagining it.
I did do the simultaneous sip.
You missed it. So the other filter says, no, he's just trash talking like he always does, and you're imagining all the bad stuff.
Which of those two filters would predict that Israel would name a settlement after President Trump?
Is it the filter that says, oh yeah, I think he's back in the neo-Nazis?
Would Israel not be able to detect That someone was backing neo-Nazis if he were the President of the United States.
Yeah, I think Israel would be able to detect that.
So my filter that says he's just talking seems to be consistent with observation.
What we observe is that Israel says, that's just politics.
He seems like the greatest friend Israel ever had.
Which of the filters would Predict that President Trump would be strong on prison reform.
Is it the one that says, my God, he'll do anything that's bad for brown and black people?
Or is it the filter that says, it's just politics.
Of course he wants what's good for Americans.
That's his job and he wants to be evaluated.
Presumably, everybody wants to be evaluated by how they do at their job.
So why would he be different?
So my filter predicts 100% of everything that's happened.
100%. My filter allows and predicts everything you observe.
But if your filter only predicts half of what happens, and the other half is just inexplicable, well, maybe it's time to rethink your filter on life.
Let's dig a little deeper into this whole go-back-home tweet.
You all know the background. I don't need to give you the background.
We're talking about President Trump's tweet that's causing everybody's hair to be on fire.
So let me show you some of the craziness that this has caused.
So over at CNN... Where opinion and news are treated as the same thing.
And I say that because CNN doesn't do a good job of separating what is opinion from what is news.
It's sort of smooshed together.
So the viewer doesn't quite know what has been presented as a fact and what is just somebody's interpretation.
Fox News has...
By anybody's measure.
Lots of different opinions. Some of them you don't agree with.
But they do a lot better job of labeling opinion.
You know that Hannity's opinion, right?
You know that Tucker's an opinion show.
Um... But listen to this, smushing.
This is an analysis by Stephan.
Do you pronounce it Stephan?
S-T-E-P-H-E-N. You never know if that's the right way to pronounce it.
Stephan Collinson.
Now, it's presented not as opinion.
It's actually labeled, on the CNN site, it's labeled analysis.
Now, you're just a dumb American and And you're reading some stuff on the CNN news site.
If it says opinion, what do you think of it?
You think, okay, well, it's not necessarily facts, it's opinion.
If it's labeled analysis, what do you, the dumb American, think they're doing?
Analysis doesn't really sound like opinion, does it?
I mean, I think that it allows it to be opinion-y.
I think the word does allow that.
But the word seems to be chosen to blur the difference between opinion and fact.
Am I wrong? Analysis?
So here's what Stephen Collinson's analysis says.
He says, this is just part of it.
In the twilight zone of the White House, the man who unleashed the fury, Trump, expressed disgust at the, quote, vile, horrible statements said by the woman he targeted over the color of their skin.
So, on a CNN site labeled Analysis, they slip in this unsupported statement, he targeted over the color of their skin.
What? What?
At what point did the president target somebody over the color of their skin?
It's presented like, well, that's obvious.
There's no point in supporting this fact.
Everybody can see it.
That's not an evidence.
Do you know who else President Trump told to go back home?
The British ambassador.
Correct me if I'm wrong, did he not send the British ambassador packing and call him stupid?
Come on!
It just happened.
He just told the British ambassador to go back home.
He didn't use those words, but is that the important part?
He said he was stupid, incompetent, had never met him.
Well, he probably met him, but didn't even know who he was, and told him to go back home.
Yeah, the British ambassador.
Did anybody say that the president is prejudiced against British people?
No. To me, what Stefan Collinson did here, by putting this sentence in his analysis, said by the women he targeted over the color of their skin, to me, that's a racist statement.
Isn't it? And my point being, that if all you're doing is talking about whether or not somebody acted about race, and the frame is race, and everything's race, and race, race, race, isn't Isn't that making things worse?
You know, the President has expressly said that if you're in the United States, he's going to be your best friend.
If you're a citizen of the country, he's going to be your best friend and supporter and cheerleader.
And if you're not, you're on the other team and he doesn't hate you, but he's going to compete against you and make sure that his team does better than the other teams.
Now that's the frame that he's continually and clearly put on all of his political actions.
The critics continually and expressly, this is not an interpretation of mine, they continually frame things as racial issues.
There's no way that isn't the racist side.
There's no way. Now, the Republicans don't make a big deal of calling the other side racist because it's just not their deal.
But we have certainly reached the point where 100% of us are racist.
We actually had a situation yesterday.
I tweeted about it. I think I had 5,000 retweets on it.
And I said that the breaking news, the racist press is reporting to the racist public That racist President Trump, or no, that racist Pelosi is accusing racist Trump of saying bad things about the racist four congresswomen.
There's nobody in that story who hasn't been accused of racism.
100% of all the people in the news have now been accused of racism.
There's nobody left.
There's nobody left.
I'm going to drink some black coffee right now and just try to experience the, whatever this is, the cognitive dissonance we're all experiencing.
And I drink this black coffee as a salute to the black citizens of this country who we support 100%.
I'll drink to that.
To that point, let me ask you this.
Hypothetically, you're a black citizen of the United States.
You've got two friends.
One of your friends is a registered Democrat.
One of your friends is a registered Republican.
Which one's going to help you get a job?
Which one's going to do you a favor?
Well, maybe both.
But I'll tell you...
Have you ever met anybody who, let's say an African American, who became a Republican?
Have you ever seen an African American Republican who said that other Republicans treat them poorly?
Have you ever seen that?
No, you've never seen that.
Because Republicans have very clear rules.
I'm not a Republican, by the way.
Right? So, I'm not a Republican.
I'm not a conservative.
I always tell people I'm left to Bernie.
But, I have to admit, I like Republicans better.
Because they have a set of consistent rules that seem pretty fair to me, and they try to live by them and treat other people by the rules.
The rules are the Constitution.
If you follow the Constitution, you're good with me.
If you follow the laws, you're good with me.
And on top of that, I'm not religious, but for a lot of conservatives, if you're religious, it doesn't matter which one.
If you've got a faith that informs the way you live, well, then you're okay, too.
Republicans make it very easy to like you.
How hard is it to be liked by a Republican?
It's really, really easy.
You just have to do legal things and And work.
That's it. In order to be loved by Republicans, just try.
You don't even have to succeed.
You just have to try.
You have to follow the law, you know, sort of love your country.
That helps, but that's not even necessary.
You know, maybe you shouldn't talk about it so much if you don't love your country.
But all Republicans ask is just follow the same rules and try.
You don't even have to succeed, and we'll love you.
I'll say we because I adopt that...
I adopt the philosophy of if we're all here trying, doing our best following the same set of rules and respecting the same set of principles that we're all good.
I can't imagine what it would be like to be a person of color and be in the Democrat orbit Because over there, you've got to be good with a lot of different things.
It's sort of eggshells over there.
Well, I was good on this, but did I become a misogynist accidentally?
And have I done everything fairly and just the right way?
Well, I think that something important has happened because of this tweet.
It seems to me that the charges of racism against each other have uncovered...
A truth that, like the dog that wasn't barking, it's a truth that we should rejoice at.
During the time that we have been talking non-stop about whether the words, go back home, are really racist or just trash talk, while we've been discussing that, how many real examples of racism have been reported in the news?
Right? Think about it.
How many actual examples of somebody, I don't know, didn't get a job, got rejected from something, I don't know, there was a racial murder.
I'm sure that these things are happening somewhere around the country, but we just have been jabbering non-stop about a couple of words in the tweet because it's the worst thing happening.
Is there anybody here who has negative feelings about, I'll just pick an example, any person of color, so long as they're following the rules, meaning the Constitution, the rule of law, working hard.
Is there anybody here who has any bad feelings about anybody who does those three things?
You know, respect the Constitution, follow the law, work hard.
Even if you don't succeed.
Everybody here respects that.
I'll bet. I'll bet there are zero exceptions.
And this is a pretty... You know, this is...
We've got, what, 2.3 thousand people watching this live.
I'll bet there are zero people here.
Zero. Out of thousands.
I'll bet there are zero people who would feel bad about any person of color, any gender, any other...
anything. As long as you follow the rules.
Same rules everybody else is following.
That's it. We'd love it if you loved your country, but it's optional.
Just follow the rules and try.
Just try. But if you're over on the Democrat side, I don't know what the standards are over there.
It must be harder. CNN has just completely gone into crazy land.
They actually had white nationalist Richard Spencer on because I guess they thought they could get him to say some quote that sounded like positive for President Trump and then they would paint President Trump with Spencer.
So Spencer's a white nationalist, I guess.
And here's what he said.
So Richard Spencer complained on CNN that Trump, quote, wasn't going far enough, saying he gave the movement nothing.
So in other words, the leader of the white nationalist movement is saying that Trump is giving them nothing.
CNN invited him on.
To get some, you know, some love of Trump, I guess, so that they can paint Trump by this guy's reputation.
And the guy says, he's given us nothing.
Yes, that's exactly right.
He's given you nothing.
But, he goes on, outside racist tweets, what do you say?
They seem like they came from a drunk uncle.
So Richard Spencer says, the only thing we've gotten from the president...
It is, in Spencer's opinion, quote, racist tweets that look like they came from a drunk uncle.
Now, here's the problem.
Who does CNN agree with?
Who's on the same team as CNN? Well, I don't think they planned it this way, but I can tell you two people who have the same view of life.
CNN and apparently Richard Spencer who also sees the president's tweets as racist.
So somehow The left has managed to align themselves with white nationalists because they have the same opinion of these tweets.
And they can't even get the white nationalists to go a little step further and say, but he's done things, right?
It's not just the tweets that look suspicious.
He's actually done things, right?
And the white nationalist says, nah, he hasn't done anything for us.
Not a thing. That must have been the saddest day on CNN when they couldn't get the white nationalists to do anything except have the same opinion as CNN. Not a good look, CNN. Does it seem to you that now that everybody's a racist,
meaning that literally just everybody's racist, and by the way, I don't say this with hyperbole, When I say that the squad looks racist to me.
I mean, they look racist in the sense that they're framing things in racial terms and they think that something should be done differently because of something-something race.
I think that's racist.
Now, here's...
You want to hear the funniest thing that I heard this morning?
I wish I could give credit...
Did I tweet it? I wish I could give credit because it's so brilliant.
So if you're on this Periscope and you're the one who said this, it's a brilliant thought.
It starts with this.
Did you notice that there was some science recently?
I don't know how recently, but there's some science to support the idea that you're born conservative or born liberal.
One of the defining characteristics is that I guess conservatives are more creeped out by yucky stuff.
They're more easily disgusted and And more easily concerned about security and fear.
So there's some thought that in terms of your DNA, you're born with a certain propensity to be either disgusted by things that are not typical, but you also have maybe more concern about security, about safety. Now suppose that's true.
Do you think that's true? Somebody says Jordan Peterson has talked about this for a long time.
Now, let's say that's true.
Now, let's also say that the squad and others have been mocking conservatives for a lot of different things.
Is it not true that...
Are these two things not in...
Are these two things in evidence?
Are these facts? So you can fact check me now.
Fact one, science says that being conservative or liberal is at least partly genetic.
You're born that way. Partly.
True. Is it also true that the people on the left mock conservatives in general?
They mock them specifically, but they also mock them in general.
Is that true? It is true.
Geordi is at me.
Geordi, you know where I'm going on this.
If your political view is that you're mocking people because of things that they can't change, in other words, genetic traits, in this case the genetic propensity to be a conservative, you are, by your own definition,
a bigot. There would be no difference, no difference scientifically, there would be no difference between mocking somebody with a handicap And mocking somebody who had a genetic propensity toward conservatism.
Am I right? Now, when somebody pointed that out to me, it was the first time I'd even heard that thought.
It was just today on Twitter.
And I thought, that is 100% true.
There's nothing wrong with that thought.
You know, my first thought was that it was just sort of a funny political thing to say.
You know, sometimes there are just clever political things to say that sound right, but they're not actually scientifically rational.
But this is actually 100% scientifically rational.
If you're making fun of conservatives as a group, and that group has a genetic...
Quality that makes them distinct, most of them.
It doesn't have to be every single one, but it doesn't work that way.
As long as most of them have this characteristic in common, if you're mocking them for being uneducated, toothless rubes who believe in conspiracy theories, or whatever people are saying about conservatives these days, even if you're calling them racist, you're treating them as a class, and it's a class that have a genetic...
Component that makes them a class.
They are a class because of a genetic component, according to science.
So, have we not reached the point where literally everyone is a bigot?
Not always just racist, because you could be bigoted against religion, and you could be bigoted against gender and everything else.
But have we not reached peak bigotry?
Well, what would be the best situation in the world?
Can I tell you?
Can I tell you the best situation in the world?
To know that you're in the healthiest, best situation, I would look for the following things.
Everybody in the world realizing that everybody else in the world, including themselves, is a bigot.
Just in different ways.
So there would be nothing healthier, in my opinion, there would be nothing healthier for this world than to realize that we're all bigoted sometimes.
Because in my view, that's the moment of greater understanding.
I would say that The people who would call themselves woke are a level below where they need to be.
There's a level above woke that's enlightened.
Woke says, we must make a separation between these people who are bigots and the good people who are not.
That's what woke means, right?
There's some people who are not bigots, they're the good people, and we should put some pressure on the people who are bigots to make them less bigoted.
That's woke. The level above woke is enlightened.
Enlightened says being less bigoted is not an option.
We're all bigoted because we have a human brain.
The human brain is not a rational device.
The human brain operates on patterns, and we're not good at patterns.
Those are the two things you need to know about the human brain.
It operates mostly on patterns, and number two, we're not good at it.
We see patterns where there are none, and then we say, hey, it's a pattern.
I guess I'll treat this like the next one will be in the same pattern, even if it isn't, because it's all I have to go on.
I usually don't have complete information about my reality, so I have to look for these little patterns and use them as sort of a proxy or a guide to what's going to happen.
So I would say that we may have completely accidentally President Trump's actions and our reactions to them have gotten us to the borderline between woke, where one person's calling another one a bigot, And enlightened where we realize we're all bigots.
We're all bigots because you can't turn off pattern recognition.
And number two, you're not good at pattern recognition.
Those are the things you need to know.
Now, what do you do with it?
What would an enlightened person do with the knowledge that bigotry is universal?
And it's not something the other guy does.
What would you do differently when you achieve that enlightenment?
Well, if you're a good person, in my opinion, so here's my personal philosophical opinion.
There's no news or fact here.
This is my opinion. You could choose to reject it or accept it.
In my opinion, the best you can do as a person, the most respect I will give you, Is if you say to yourself, yeah, we're all bigots, sometimes it happens to me, and I'm going to use my best social reasoning to overcome it.
I'm going to try to overcome it.
If you're saying that, you're the best person a person can be.
A person who says, I'm not a bigot and you're a bigot, are operating at a lower level of enlightenment.
If they say, you're a bigot, and oh my god, sometimes I am too, you're operating at a higher level.
And then, in order to be responsible, to be a responsible citizen of the world, operating at that higher level, where you say, yeah, it's all of us, but what can I do about it?
If you're saying, what can I do about it, you're good at my book.
You're completely good.
You're just dealing with what, you know, how do you deal with the fact that the human brain is a pattern-recognizing machine and we're not good at it?
So I think the president has laid bare the fact that everybody's a bigot.
That's a fact I think we can no longer ignore, would you say?
I would say that the entire conversation about the squad is The entire conversation about immigration, the entire conversation about whether conservatives or liberals are the good ones, that entire conversation should be revealing in the clearest possible way that woke is broke and that there's a level above it And the president,
just completely accidentally, I don't think that he had any intention to do what I'm saying, but by showing that everything is bigoted, and that even if you were to take the position that the country is the best organizing principle, the president consistently says,
country good, people outside the country on the other team, and the so-called good people who think that bigotry is only something that other people have, Those people have decided to flip out and go crazy and treat the country as if that's somehow the same as bigotry.
So, we may have completely accidentally blundered into a new level of enlightenment that I think is important.
Let me give you a positive thing.
So without getting into details of my personal life, I was listening to a conversation from some preteens.
Teens, actually.
Some young teens in my local area were having a conversation and I was listening to it.
The entire conversation was about race.
It was people talking about their friends, and they were saying, you know, this friend is one of these, and this friend is one of these, and these people talk this way, and these people have this funny accent, and these people have this characteristic.
And my first reaction to it was shock, because all they talked about was race.
My second reaction...
Was that they all loved each other.
Which was shocking.
Because the way they were talking about race was not really negative.
In fact, you know, it was jokingly negative in the way that teenagers joke.
But it wasn't negative in their hearts.
You could tell that there was affection and that race was a conversation and that they were sort of...
Let's just say they were...
What would I say? They were interacting with the differences.
They were talking about the differences.
This group has these tendencies, whatever.
But none of it seemed mean-spirited.
It seems like the generation coming up talks about race completely explicitly and all the time.
Because it doesn't mean the same thing.
It's lost its power.
Now, I'm not sure that this would be the same everywhere and with every group, but it's just one of those little things you see and you say, wow, you know, it looks like it lost its power because the people who were talking were, you know, it was a mixed group.
So I hope that's a good thing, and I hope it's not...
I hope I'm not misunderstanding what was going on there, but it looks like, and I've seen this before, by the way, it's not the one conversation I've seen, but it seems like the next generation is going to be just having fun with the differences, but not taking them too seriously, which would be a gigantic leap forward for civilization, I think.
All right. Let's talk about something else.
This is one of the complaints.
I think this was on CNN or somewhere.
I think it was on CNN. Some analysts said about Trump and his comments about the squad.
Someone said that he's playing a risky political game, though it may be the only one he really knows how to play.
And I'm thinking, you have to dig pretty deeply to find something to insult the President for if he has a strategy that keeps working.
Yes, his strategy keeps working, but, okay, what can we say about a strategy that keeps working?
It may be the only one he really knows how to play.
Well, if there's only one strategy that might work, and it's the one that he uses, and it works, Is it really an insightful analysis to say it may be the only one he knows how to play?
Yeah, he doesn't know how to play the losing hands.
He doesn't know how to do the things that don't work.
What does that even mean?
Everybody knows how to do things that don't work.
Um... Now, compare President Trump to a normal politician.
So, Mitch McConnell, of course, got dragged into all the controversy, and CNN's Manu Raju asked McConnell, what would he say if someone told his wife, Elaine Chao, Trump's transportation secretary, what would McConnell say if somebody told his wife to, quote, go back to where she came from, which would be Taiwan, I guess?
And here's how McConnell answered that question.
So McConnell is asked this big, big old racist, you know, racism question.
And his answer was that he was a fan of legal immigration.
McConnell just sucked all the life out of the question.
It's like, what would you say if somebody told your wife to go home?
What would you say, Mitch McConnell?
Huh? Huh? Huh?
Take the bait. Take the bait, McConnell.
You'll do it. Do it.
We're going to get a quote out of you.
You're going to be all over the news.
Wait till you say something stupid, Mitch McConnell.
What are you going to say to that? We're going to ship your wife back home.
What would you say to that?
McConnell says, I'm a big fan of legal immigration.
And everybody says, I'm not even sure that's on topic, but okay, you just bored us to death, and we did not get a quote out of you.
All right.
So I saw some speculation that Iran might be might be convinced that President Trump is going to be reelected.
I don't know how they would be convinced of that exactly, because the polls clearly say that Biden will win.
But all the smart people are pretty sure that Biden doesn't have a chance.
Yes.
So I don't know how Iran is clever enough to sort that out, because it seems like they would look at the polls and say, well, it looks like every single Democrat who's in the top four could beat this president, so we don't have to deal with this guy.
He's going to be gone in 2020.
But I think that Iran is clever enough that they listen to the right people, and the right people are saying, it's not going to be Biden.
And it looks like Trump is cruising to re-election.
So what that does is it changes their calculation about who they're going to be negotiating with and it takes off the table The option of waiting till 2020 and getting somebody else to negotiate with who could give them, in their view, a better deal.
So the fact that the president's reelection looks likely gives the United States a tremendous bargaining advantage.
And it's created...
I think Iran is in this weird little zone where they're trying to make noise and they're trying to cause a little bit of trouble, but they don't want to cause a lot of trouble because this president has created an impression that he is unpredictable, and you don't know when you're going to cross his line.
They probably thought they crossed his line already, but he played it cool, and now they're thinking, all right, well, I don't know, if we do a little more than that, Are we going to get, you know, bombed if we do a little more than we've done?
But doing less than we've done isn't going to make any difference, so what are you going to do?
So I think the President has put Iran in a position in which their incentive to negotiate is pretty high.
And I'll say this again because it's so shocking.
Peace in the Middle East, just, you know, the phrase peace in the Middle East sounds so ridiculous that you tell yourself, well, that's not even a thing.
It's a perpetual war zone.
It will always be a perpetual war zone.
And on some level that might be true, you know, at the small level.
But just think about this.
At this point in time, with this president, and some of it's luck, but some of it is the way they treat the Middle East and the leaders there, etc., President Trump has gotten the Middle East, not by himself, but he's a big part of it.
The Middle East has reached a point where peace, a broad peace for the entire Middle East, is down to one guy who's in his 80s, the Ayatollah Committee.
So if the Supreme Leader of Iran ever decides to negotiate in good faith, we don't know if he ever will, But he's the last person.
Now, maybe there's somebody behind him.
If he were replaced, maybe he would be just the same.
But there's just one position.
Just one person has to change their mind, and we're done.
Just one person has to say, you know, I don't think anything that we do is going to change the reality that Israel exists, and it's going to keep existing.
Just one person.
Think about that.
Have we ever been this close that one person just needs to change their mind?
And that one person is under tremendous pressure, internally and externally, to change his mind.
Some people ask me about Turkey.
Turkey is a weird situation because they're a NATO ally, At the same time, we didn't want them to have anti-aircraft missiles because I guess they're taking shipment of some Russian anti-aircraft missiles.
So I don't quite understand our position on Turkey because either you're a NATO ally or you're not.
If you're a NATO ally, do we care that you have a way to defend yourself?
I don't think that buying Russian missiles Turkey is our first choice, but it's not the worst problem in the world, is it?
Are we going to bomb Turkey?
I don't think we're planning on bombing Turkey.
So why do we care if they have good anti-aircraft?
And by the way, who is Turkey defending against?
I don't know the answer to that.
Can somebody tell me who does Turkey think is going to attack them from the air?
Why am I just thinking of this now?
I don't even know why Turkey has a threat.
Does anybody even know?
Because ISIS doesn't have an air force.
They are an occupied NATO ally, somebody saying.
Well, I don't know what that means.
Yeah, they don't need anti-aircraft missiles because of immigration.
They don't need it because of their neighbors.
Not really. Really.
Do you think Turkey has a risk from Iraq?
Does Turkey have a risk from Iran from the air?
I don't think so.
But, I don't know, I guess they need them.
So if those are the problems that we have, that one of our allies is buying weapons from somebody else, I don't know if we have the biggest problem in the world.
But I think we're very close to something like peace in the Middle East.
One person away, and that person is tipping.
That person is leaning.
Turkey can't use our equipment with Russia stuff.
Yeah, well, I'm sure that we would rather sell Turkey our own American equipment, and there are probably lots of strategic and other advantages in doing that.
Somebody says, I lived in Turkey, I know.
Well, I missed what it is that you know.
Internal coups, Greece.
Everybody has a different idea of why Turkey needs anti-aircraft missiles, but I guess we're all guessing.
All right, I think we've said what we need to say.
If the only thing that we're worried about today is we're all killing each other bigots, then maybe we can reach a higher level, and maybe that's this year.
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