Episode 1004 Scott Adams: Polite Riots, Social Media Regulation, Poorly Educated News Consumers
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Minneapolis burns, police flee, CNN camera team arrested
CNN's Chief Mind-Reader knows President Trumps inner thoughts
WHO still says masks ONLY for medical professionals and sick
Twitter flags another President Trump tweet
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Things are getting better all over the place, while looking worse, but they're getting better.
I'll tell you all about that in a minute.
But first, you might want to enjoy a little thing called a simultaneous sip, and it doesn't take much.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tack or a chalice or a stye, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic and riots too.
Which you could call protests.
Here it comes, the simultaneous sip.
Go! Mmm, yes.
I feel the tensions diminishing.
Well, is this the weirdest kind of day?
I don't know if you're noticing this.
But unity is breaking out everywhere?
Except we're so trained not to see it that we're still acting as though we're somehow on different sides, but we're not.
Because while you were not noticing, Black Lives Matters, Antifa, and President Trump just strongly took the same side.
In the question about the George Lloyd shooting.
Now that's true, right?
True or false, Black Lives Matter, Antifa and President Trump have strongly taken the same side of this.
I think that's true.
Did you expect that?
Probably not.
Probably not, right?
How about, what is the opinion of CNN and Fox News today?
About the police in Minneapolis.
Pretty similar today.
Fox News and CNN. Suddenly, kumbaya.
They both agree that the arrest of the CNN reporter on the scene was a little bit too far.
I don't know if you watched the video, but you really have to watch the video to appreciate how ridiculous it was.
Because the CNN crew and reporter, for the benefit of the story, and because of the context of the story, you have to know that the reporter, his last name is Jimenez, but he's very dark-skinned.
This is important to the story, not important to you or me, but important to the story.
And they decide that they're going to arrest this poor bastard, along with some white crew members, apparently, and they were completely cooperating.
They were saying on camera, live, while the police were there, oh, just tell us where you want us to go.
You know, we were just getting out of your way when we came over here, but let us know what you want us to do.
We'll be happy to do it.
And then they arrested him, and the guy's being arrested.
He's like, for what?
What am I being arrested for?
And I gotta say, if that had been me, and the cameras were rolling...
I think I would have flipped out.
I think I would have gone absolutely batshit crazy and see if the police tried to rough me up on camera.
I don't know if I could let that situation go.
I mean, I would have taken a little bit of a knee to the neck just because the cameras were rolling.
So I think that the reporter left a good opportunity for grandstanding behind.
I don't think I would have left that behind.
I would have started screaming.
Here's what I would have done.
I wouldn't have started physically resisting.
That would be crazy. But I would have started screaming that they're not telling me why they're arresting me.
Because they kind of owe you that, right?
They do need to tell you why you're being arrested, especially when you're not resisting arrest.
And if they don't tell you why you're being arrested, I would have just flipped out.
I would have just gone crazy.
Not physically, just verbally.
He missed a good chance.
So, it's the weirdest situation.
I think the President has done exactly the right thing.
He's agreeing with almost all of the public, and certainly Black Lives Matter and Antifa, about this one situation with the police officer killing George Lloyd.
But here's what's interesting.
We all agree that the president is taking the right position on this, right?
So what does CNN say when the president does unambiguously the right thing that they also agree with?
How does CNN cover the news when President Trump does exactly the right thing?
Do you know? In the comments, see if you can guess.
Brian Stelter covers it this way.
Trump should have weighed in sooner.
That's right. If you do the right thing, the criticism is it should have been done sooner.
And as you know, there's no such thing as anything good that shouldn't have been done sooner.
So it's sort of the generic complaint.
So MSNBC apparently has decided that they're going to report the happenings in Minnesota, the so-called rioting, so-called looting, so-called protesting.
They're going to call it protesting because it's more protest than riot.
Sure, there are some buildings on fire.
Yes, yes, yes, they overtook a police precinct and set it on fire, but mostly in a peaceful protest kind of a way, while they're breaking the windows out of police cars as they tried to get away.
So that's MSNBC's coverage.
So Trump, of course, just to make all the stories more interesting, Trump tweets that if there's looting, you know, the looting will be followed by shooting.
I forget the exact quote. But because shooting was part of the tweet, Twitter decided to flag it and And hide it, I guess.
Hide it or flag it?
I forget which one. But anyway, they're semi-censoring the tweet.
I think you can still find it.
You can still find it, so it's not like you don't know what he said.
But the reason given this time is that it glorifies violence.
Because shooting was mentioned in somewhat of an optimistic context.
Which is weird, because You know, if you heard that one of the looters got a shot, I don't know if he'd be unhappy.
I don't. I mean, you should about the loss of life, but I don't know if you would.
Because we watch the video and we think, well, maybe if a few of them had some bad outcome, there might be less of it.
I don't know. As I told you before, I suspect this is the last time we might see this sort of thing because so many of them are eventually going to get arrested.
There should be mass arrests eventually because there's so many people just on film.
It can't be that hard to round them up.
So we'll see what happens.
So, would you call it a riot if some buildings are burning?
I don't know that it matters.
It sounds like most of the people want to be peaceful.
There are reports that Black Lives Matter are trying to keep Antifa from getting too violent.
I don't know if I could enjoy this anymore.
What could you enjoy more than watching Black Lives Matter try to keep Antifa from destroying their city?
I mean, that just takes it to the ridiculous level.
So Michael Ballas had an insightful tweet this morning.
He said, I don't know if I can get the gist of it.
But the idea was that conservatives are being red-pilled about how bad it is to be a black citizen stopped by police.
So we're probably understanding it at a deeper level than we understood it before, wouldn't you say?
Because it's not like we didn't all know there was an issue there.
Everybody knew there was an issue, but watching the video gives you a completely different feel for it.
So I think that, genuinely, a lot of the country just woke up a little bit to something they knew, but they didn't know it in their body.
They sort of knew it intellectually.
They knew it was a story, but they didn't know it in their body.
And I think that's what the video does.
Now you can actually feel it.
You can actually put yourself in the position of George Lloyd.
And by the way, you've probably done that, haven't you?
Have you spent no time...
I'll bet you have.
You've imagined you are George Lloyd, have you not?
It's an interesting question.
How many of you have at least spent a second...
Thinking what it would be like, you're on the ground, and what would you do, and how did it feel, and what did his last moments feel like?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about that.
So when you go from a concept, you know, there's police brutality, there's a concern that it's aimed at some groups more than others, you can sort of intellectualize that and then just move on to the next topic.
But if you spend a little time Sort of living in your imagination of what it's like to be George Lloyd in his last moments of life, you feel differently about it.
So I think there actually was some kind of important inflection point that happened because of that video.
But at the same time, as Michael Ballas points out, I think we're all being red-pilled about the corporate media.
Meaning that the left used to trust the media and now they're just finding out, wait a minute, are you telling me that even my own side is lying to me?
Yes. Yes.
Your own side is lying to you because that's the new business model of the press telling you what will get the most clicks.
And so is it a coincidence that Black Lives Matter, Antifa, President Trump, CNN, and Fox News are all on the same side?
This should be reported as one of the greatest things that's ever happened to the country, because it is.
It's horrible in Minnesota, but what this is doing to our psychology, and you've got the additional context of the COVID, The COVID thing was, yet again, another situation where what was one of the biggest concerns in the country?
One of the biggest, most talked about concerns is that it was hitting the African-American community hardest.
There was intense effort to make sure everybody got fed.
There is continuous talk about how this is hurting the lower economic strata the most.
There is something terribly unifying About the virus.
It was a common enemy. So in the context of a common enemy, where we've all just spent three months, everybody's locked down, everybody's trying to help each other.
We are trying to help each other.
It's unambiguous.
There's no question about it.
No matter what community you're in, you just watched every other community step up and say, alright, how can we help?
Who's in trouble? Doesn't matter what your color is.
Doesn't matter where you live. We don't care about your religion.
Who needs help? That's the mode we've been in.
We've been in a mode where nothing matters except you're a human, you need some help.
That's it. And then this comes up.
And weirdly, the timing of it just couldn't be better in terms of the psychology of the country because I think it has unified us all in a weird way.
Now, it's not going to look like it because the news is going to report Division wherever it can find it, but I think this might change us.
It might actually change us.
So, that's the positive news.
Over at CNN, they have a pundit who I'm going to give him a nickname.
He's the Chief Mind Reader.
So about once every few days he writes an article for CNN.com in which he reads the president's mind and finds bad things in there.
For example, today is an article he was impeached for using presidential powers to influence an election.
That's what CNN is saying.
That's not a fact.
That's an interpretation, but okay.
And now it says, it's now clear that his acquittal in a Senate trial only encouraged him to use that authority to serve his personal whims in a pattern that becomes more pronounced.
So how do we know that his acquittal encouraged him to use the authority of the government for his personal whims?
That's kind of mind-reading, isn't it?
Because that's not an evidence.
All this in evidence is what he does.
We don't have an evidence of his inner thoughts.
But the chief mind reader at CNN says we do.
And that he's using the machinery of government to address personal affronts.
Is that what he's doing?
Is he using the machinery of government to address personal affronts?
Or is he trying to make social media more fair?
I don't know. Interpretation.
Alright. So the World Health Organization continues to say that masks should not be used except by healthcare professionals.
So now the CDC and the United States medical authorities say masks are good and you should wear masks, but the World Health Organization says they're not recommended for healthy people.
So, when somebody says you should trust the experts, who should you trust?
Should you trust the World Health Organization, their experts, and their advice is the opposite of the CDC, who are experts?
And this leads me to a tweet today by Richard Dawkins.
You know Richard Dawkins, famous religious skeptic, meaning he's skeptical of religion.
And he tweeted this, and I assume he was talking about the whole fact-checking social media situation.
He tweeted, How could fact-checking ever, ever as in all caps, how could fact-checking ever be a bad thing?
The only limit to fact-checking should be the time and expense of doing so.
What honest, reasonable person could ever, also in capital, object to being fact-checked?
Now, I just gave you an example.
How would you fact check masks are good versus masks are bad?
How would you fact check that?
Would you fact check it by going to the experts?
Because the experts disagree.
So, how does Richard Dawkins, who's a famous scientist, a famous rational person, how in the world does he not know that the problem with fact checking is that the fact checkers are Really not to be trusted.
You know, as many times as there have been articles written about Richard Dawkins, and there have been a lot, has he not noticed how often they're wrong?
And most of them have been fact-checked.
So fact-checking doesn't really work.
And I'm surprised that he thinks it does.
But I'm not saying you should not fact-check.
I'm just saying that How could fact-checking ever be a bad thing is his direct question?
And he says, how could it ever be a bad thing?
He doesn't say, it's more good than bad, which I would probably agree with.
Yeah, it's more good than bad.
It's better to do than not do.
I would say that.
But how could you ask, how could it ever be a bad thing?
You'd have to be in a coma for the last four years to ask, how could that ever be a bad thing?
All right. So now we've seen Twitter flag two Trump tweets.
One, because they had inaccurate election information.
Now, Fox News is reporting it, that they were talking about his statements that ballot...
So the way Fox News is reporting it is wrong, I think.
Which is that...
I just noticed something wrong with my wall.
That's weird. Fox News is reporting that the problem was the president was saying that...
Well, you know the story.
It's too boring. I'm just going to bail out of the story because it was too boring.
You'll be happy about it.
All right. That's what's happening right now.
I would challenge you...
To see if you can figure out the positive in today's stories.
I think it's a positive that there's creative friction between the public and the government and social media.
We don't know how this will come out, but whenever you see creative friction, I think that's a good sign.
So it was one thing when there was lots of grumbling about social media, but there was no sense of equal power.
Social media could do whatever it wanted.
The users could grumble, but what are you going to do?
You know, there's only one Facebook, there's one Twitter.
For all practical purposes.
I know there are competitors.
But what are you going to do?
So you end up just complaining about it.
But now the president has decided to even up the power structure.
Now it's the government versus social media, which is kind of a fair fight.
If you think about it, I'm not even sure who has more horsepower.
Because Google can hire the best lawyers in the world.
The government can get great lawyers and has its own power.
It's kind of a fair fight.
And this is the kind of fair fight that you should be happy about.
Because even though we don't know where it ends, it's almost certainly going to move us to a more credible situation.
Whatever comes out of it will probably be something that's a little bit better, at least.
Concealment of POTUS's remarks has gone too far.
Well, let's say that the categories that they decide to censor are limited to facts about the election, And something that glorifies violence.
Suppose that was all they ever fact-checked.
And if it's the president, of course you see it anyway.
We've all seen his tweet more than we would have.
Because it got banned. So if the effect of fact-checking the president's tweets is that we all are more exposed to them, not less, I don't know if that's really censorship.
Because the net effect is we get more communication about the thing that was censored.
Now that's unique to the president.
If it happens to one of us, then that's just the end of it.
Our voices are disappeared.
But it's a good fight.
It's a good fight to have.
I don't know how it's going to come out, but I like that society is wrestling with this.
Somebody said, Trump didn't glorify violence.
Well, you know, that's an opinion, and that's the problem with any kind of fact-checking and any kind of censorship.
It's always an opinion.
There's no way around it.
So you either have to not allow it or accept the fact that it's an opinion.
Somebody says, CNN doesn't want Biden to win.
He's too boring. Yeah, I think there's real mixed feelings there.
Yeah, there's real mixed feelings there.
All right. Was he saying the military would shoot or the store owners would begin shooting?
Well, I think he was just in favor of that as being a solution.
And the fact is, a lot of you are in favor of it too.
You know, if you heard tomorrow that, and I think there's at least one case of a shop owner killing a looter, I was kind of hoping for a few more.
Am I allowed to say that?
Am I allowed to say that I was hoping that a few more store owners would take matters into their own hands and defend their stores?
Is that glorifying violence?
That's a good question.
Does it glorify violence when I say I would like to see people defending in legitimate self-defense Their property against looters, even if that meant somebody died.
And the answer is, I would actually be happy to see that.
Is that glorifying violence?
I don't know. I actually don't know.
I think it's glorifying justice.
I think it glorifies a solution to a problem which recognizes that I don't care about the fate of the looters.
I actually don't.
I think if somebody puts themselves in a certain type of risk, they know what they're doing.
And if things don't go well, and they chose that risk of knowing that things very likely would not go well, well, I don't know that that's my problem.
I don't know that I'm going to spend any time worrying about that.
All right. Let's see.
All right. I think all of you would agree with that.
